


Fluff and Nonsense

by damnslippyplanet



Series: Fluff and Nonsense N'at [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M, Tumblr Prompts, individual chapter notes have summaries/warnings as needed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2017-09-25
Packaged: 2018-05-10 07:43:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 20,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5577109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/pseuds/damnslippyplanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Apparently I take Tumblr prompts now for short Hannibal ficlets.  They'll be collected here.  Tags/ratings subject to be updated depending on what I end up writing. Drop me a line over at <a href="http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com">my Tumblr</a> if you want to chat about an idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Welcome Home

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Я хотел удивить тебя](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14001924) by [Setchi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Setchi/pseuds/Setchi)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: On the subject of cats (and if you're taking prompts) can I please request Hannibal rescuing a cat and Will throwing a strop because he's allergic/a dog person/generally annoyed with Hanners for whatever reason :)

“Two days. I was gone for _two days_.”  Will’s worked up to a brisk pace back and forth across the bedroom floor but not yet to wild hand-gesticulation.  That usually comes next; Hannibal’s on the lookout for it.

“And I walked the dogs, as you requested. And they found her in the woods. Was I supposed to let her die out there?”

Will stops dead and stares at Hannibal, one eyebrow rising so high it’s threatening to fly off his face altogether. Hannibal can just about see him tallying up numbers behind his eyes - all the people he knows Hannibal’s killed, the smaller but more precious number they’ve killed together.  They both know that Hannibal does not, in general, have a problem with letting death have its way. Or with giving it a nudge.

He ignores Will for the moment, running a hand over the kitten’s back instead. She’s so small she can just about fit in a single one of his hands, and she’s fallen asleep warm and feather-light on his lap.  He murmurs quietly to her in his native tongue, _Don’t listen to him, darling girl. He’s going to let you stay. He just doesn’t know it yet._

Will’s eyes narrow. He doesn’t know much Lithuanian but he knows _darling_. And there he goes with the hand gestures. If he gets a little more wound up, that muscle in his right cheek will start to twitch.  It’s delicious. Sometimes Hannibal makes him angry just to see it.  That’s not why he brought home the tiny bedraggled scrap of fur from the woods, but it’s a delightful side-effect of his impromptu decision.

Will’s hand flies wide and open as he ramps up, in a vague but emphatic gesture of frustration. “In case you haven’t noticed, we have four dogs.  They’ll eat her within a week.”

“Not if you’ve trained them as well as you think you have, darling.” There goes the muscle twitch. “Lupo and Isa didn’t harm her when they found her, and we can introduce her to the others slowly. It can’t be that much different than introducing a new dog.”

“There are a million dogs who need homes if you changed your mind about us being at our pet limit. And dogs make _sense_. They _do_ things. You can _train_ them.  Cats are impossible. Have you ever _had_ a cat, Hannibal?  Do you have any idea?”

Hannibal was expecting that, and he has his answer ready.  And it’s true, but perhaps exaggerated just a wee bit.  "We had a sort of barn cat when I was very young. I played with her sometimes. She wasn’t allowed in the house.  I would have liked to have one later on, but neither orphanages nor boarding schools are particularly conducive to such things.“ 

Quietly, to the cat, in the language he intends to share with her if she turns out to be smart enough to learn a few words, he adds: _You will learn, darling girl, that my beloved has a weakness for orphans.  It may work to your advantage as well as it does mine. I suggest you play it up_.  She rolls over partway and blinks up at him and he would swear, he would _swear_ that she understood, his clever girl.

The twitch stops and Will’s shoulders slump a little as some of his annoyance fades. “That’s not fair, Hannibal. You know that’s not fair. You can’t pull that card out every time you want something.”

Hannibal waits him out, patient, and does not point out that it was perhaps also not fair when Will brought home the fourth dog after they’d agreed to stop at three. This isn’t meant to be retaliation.  He wants the cat; already feels an animal sort of kinship with her, her fussy ways and ravenous appetite and sharp claws.  

Eventually Will sighs heavily and sits down on the floor, putting him close to eye level with the cat.  She opens her green eyes and views him with a bit of suspicion, which he returns.  It’s not the _most_ auspicious beginning, but it’s not the worst either.  

Will holds out a hand and the kitten sniffs at it thoughtfully.  Hannibal tells her, _It’s okay. He’s family. He’s ours_.  She considers, and then finally reaches out a single paw to hold Will’s hand in place.  She licks Will’s skin curiously two or three times, then takes her paw back and returns to her coiled position on Hannibal’s thigh.

Will’s jaw twitches but he knows he’s beaten.  He shifts to a more comfortable position since he’s already down on the floor, and leans his own head against Hannibal’s knee.  He mutters, half-muffled by the fabric of Hannibal’s pants, “I’m not cooking for her, and I’m not scolding the dogs if they eat her.”

Hannibal resists the urge to smile.  No need to rub the victory in.  He moves his hand from the kitten to Will’s dark hair, running a hand through it to find where the strands of silver lie.

He’ll get up in a few minutes and start the dinner preparations he was holding until Will’s return.  For now, he stays where he is and says only _welcome home_.


	2. Fear of Mortality, And Cures For Same

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If I could leave a prompt, Hannibal with reading glasses? It's unreal how we've never seen him wearing one.

Hannibal studies his reflection. One of the minor frustrations of life under a false identity is the need to consider not just what one prefers, but what one’s false person suit would prefer. Not that this is new; if Hannibal weren’t good at this game he’d have gotten caught decades earlier. But the extra layer, the person suit on top of the person suit on top of the monster, is a little stifling.

This might work, though. This might be something both Hannibal, and his current alter ego Tomas, can live with.

He adjusts the glasses to sit further up his nose. It feels awkward. He’s perfectly aware that he’s putting this much energy into selecting the glasses for their aesthetics, so he doesn’t have to think about their meaning. Reading glasses will slide eventually into bifocals and even more grey in his hair and slowing of his reflexes and…

“Tomas.” Will’s voice cuts through his thoughts, even using his false name. Will’s hands reach to settle the glasses properly, to brush Hannibal’s hair back down over the earpieces. Will smiles at him and suddenly everything is all right again. “You’re going to be wearing these an hour or two a day. They’re just for reading. Don’t go into a fear-of-mortality tailspin on me, okay?”

Hannibal nods and focuses. “These might do. What do you think?”

The salesclerk cuts in, sounding a little desperate. “Those suit you nicely. Don’t you think so?” He turns pleading eyes on Will. He’s been very patient while Hannibal tries on pair after pair of glasses and he’s probably starting to think he’ll never get a lunch break.

Will studies Hannibal through narrowed eyes. (Grey-green today, no glasses, his hair’s a little too long and unruly and threatening to obscure those eyes. Hannibal notes these things automatically and files them away in his endless recollection of Ways Will Graham Looks At Him that will sustain him the rest of his life if they’re ever separated again.) Will tips one head to the side and then asks the clerk politely, “Could you give us just a moment?”

The clerk appears to be dying a little inside. Maybe he’s seeing his sale walk out the door after wasting his time. But he steps away, to the other side of the store to shuffle papers with a long-suffering sigh.

Will plucks the glasses off Hannibal’s face deftly, folds them and puts them aside, and reaches for another pair in the pile they’ve amassed. Hannibal has no idea how he’s selected the pair in question; he’s tried on so many they all look the same to him now. But Will seems to know exactly what he wants, as if he’s had his eye on that pair since Hannibal first tried them on. Hannibal plays at obedience, standing still so Will can slip them over his ears, settle them on his face, and look him over again.

Will studies him for a moment, nods as if satisfied at the answer to some question that was only asked in his head, and then in one swift movement he steps close, grasps at Hannibal’s shirt collar, and presses their mouths together, sliding his free hand up into Hannibal’s hair. Hannibal ignores the faint cough of the clerk somewhere behind them, ignores the chiming of a bell as the shop door opens or closes, ignores the tinny sound of the radio, and melts into Will. They kiss until his lungs are about to burst from lack of oxygen, and then Will finally draws back. Hannibal watches him quizzically, far from displeased, but not entirely sure what that was all about either. Will smiles fondly at him and reaches over again to adjust his glasses where they’ve been thoroughly knocked askew.

“That’s the pair. You look amazing. I’m going to make you wear these for me a lot more than an hour or two a day. And we’re going to practice that until you can keep them on properly.” He shifts his glance off to the right, to the salesclerk who is now a thoroughly bright shade of red. “We’ll take these. When can we pick them up?”

He doesn’t ask if Hannibal will take the ones Will likes. He doesn’t have to. Hannibal looks down to where Will’s fingers are still twisted tight in his shirt, and up to Will’s lips reddened by that kiss, and suddenly he’s not feeling any fear of mortality at all.


	3. The Cat That Caught the Canary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from [tangerine](http://archiveofourown.org/users/arte/pseuds/tangerine): Oh god now I want to see animal transformation fic. Like, maybe Hannibal is cursed during the murder husband stage and Will takes care of Hannibal, and Hannibal is thinking 'Sweet cinnamon roll, who would help him hunt, i'll show him the way' and licking Will cuz 'Why can't you groom yourself, honestly.' Bonus point if they'd been in a no-sex relationship and Hannibal licks Will by accident after he returns to being human.
> 
> Note: Tangerine then went on and wrote this idea up quite nicely (and more long-form) themselves, so you might want to go [take a look at that](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5510507) if this prompt is your jam.

Will stands in the hallway outside his closed bedroom door and braces himself. Again. As he’s done every day for a week.  After a solid week of this, he can’t deny it anymore.  Either he lives in a world where Hannibal Lecter turned into a cat and won’t or can’t turn back, or he’s finally gone completely and utterly out of his mind.  He’s not sure which option he’d prefer.

He’s keeping Hannibal shut in his bedroom, since the second day when one of the dogs got a little too close and Hannibal nearly took out his eye.  The worst part was that he’d done it in deadly silence.  None of the hissing or yowling you’d expect from a cat.  Just swift, silent retribution.  Since then, Hannibal doesn’t have the run of the house.  He lives in Will’s room with the window cracked open so he can come and go as he pleases outside the house.

Will’s considered shutting the window so Hannibal will stop bringing him small dead things, lining them up precisely next to (and once in) Will’s shoes.  He can’t decide whether it’s just cat behavior, trying to feed the human perceived as helpless, or if Hannibal’s still in there somewhere and expressing his opinion about the shoes.

But he doesn’t think he could handle litterbox-training Hannibal - that might be the small final straw that sends him howling into the abyss of insanity - so he lets Hannibal come and go.  He lets Hannibal nestle into the hollow of his back at night, or lie on Will’s pillow licking his fingers, and he tries to understand what he’s supposed to do, and he has no fucking clue.

So he’s just been doing this. Caring for Hannibal. Observing and oddly enjoying all the fussy, dainty, headstrong ways in which Hannibal is unlike a dog.  Maybe unlike a cat, too; Will’s not sure how much of this is normal cat behavior and how much is just…Hannibal, irrepressible in any body.

The night before, he’d caught himself nuzzling into one of Hannibal’s soft furry cheeks, whiskers brushing delicately against his skin, and thinking _this is okay. I can do this. They can’t take him away from me now, if they find us. He’ll be safe._ And then he’d thought about the lifespan of a cat and he’d been caught between tears and hysterical laughter.  Hannibal had placed a gentle paw against his cheek, claws sheathed in velvet, and delicately licked at the single tear Will had shed.  

He might be losing his mind.  But maybe losing his mind with Hannibal-the-cat is better than doing anything else without him.  So he takes a deep breath, shifts the bowl of chopped-up chicken into one hand, and eases the door open with the other.

And there’s Hannibal in Will’s bed.  Human Hannibal, curled up tight like his feline counterpart, fast asleep.  Very, very naked.  Will tries not to drop the chicken, tries not to stare at Hannibal, and ends up doing both.

Hannibal’s eyes fly open and he jerks his head up off the pillow.  He sits up and flows into a stretch, long and sleek and seemingly entirely unbothered by his nudity despite his apparent confusion about the rest of his situation.

Will tries to find somewhere, anywhere else to look.  There’s a spot on the ceiling that suddenly seems very, very interesting.

Hannibal yawns wide and seemingly endlessly and then asks, “Is there a reason I’m in your bed?  I don’t object, but I had hoped that if I ever ended up here I’d remember how it happened.”

 _Very_ interesting, that spot on the ceiling.

“I. Um. That’s. Kind of a story.  Let’s start with, what do you remember about the past several days?”  Will dares to bring his eyes back from the ceiling and tries to keep them very firmly on Hannibal’s face, and nowhere else.

Hannibal’s eyes narrow, and Will’s surprised for a minute to see they’re not cat pupils.  “I suppose I’d need to know what day this is to answer that.  But my memory seems…fuzzy.”

Will lets out an entirely involuntarily laugh at the word “fuzzy”, thinking of the day he’d spent a solid half hour with his fingers deep in the fur of Hannibal-the-cat’s fuzzy stomach, and then claps a hand over his mouth. “Sorry. Rude. Please go on.”

“I think I remember…hunting, out in the woods?”  Hannibal inspects his hands with an odd expression, like he expects them to have retractable claws attached.  “And I remember being here, with you. You…took care of me, I think. I can’t quite remember why I needed it.  Is that right?”

“I did. You were…god, I’m so glad to see you. I don’t really understand what happened either, but I’ll try to tell you about it. Can you maybe put on some clothes first?”

Hannibal seems amused by the request but he rises from the bed and heads toward the door, toward his own room and closet.  Will doesn’t step out of the way fast enough to entirely avoid contact, Hannibal brushing past him.  

Not that it would matter if he had, because Hannibal stops in his tracks right then and lifts one hand to Will’s cheek (warm and rough, nothing like those soft cool pink pawpads he’d had just yesterday) and - sniffs him?  But it’s not quite like he’s smelled Will in the past, this is closer to a nuzzle or a headbutt. Closer to something he would have done in the past week that’s already starting to feel like something Will maybe dreamed.

He leans in closer still and brushes against Will’s lips and it’s something like a kiss?  Something like a lick?  It’s uncategorizable. A quick tiny pressure of his tongue just parting Will’s lips and then gone again before Will can figure out how to respond.

Hannibal tucks a stray lock of Will’s hair back into place and purrs at him, in a voice so rough that Will honestly can’t tell whether it’s entirely human or whether he may hear a real purr underneath, “I smell like you.  You smell like me.  Whatever happened, I think I’m glad.  I’ll be back shortly and you can tell me all about it.”

He pulls back and grins at Will, wide as a Cheshire cat, as the cat that caught the canary, and Will suddenly understands every cat-related idiom he’s ever heard.  


	4. hands that map a communion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from [Birth of the Phoenix](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Birth_of_the_Phoenix): I often see Hannibal giving Will a massage in fics (usually as a warm up to sex), but I rarely see Will returning the favor. I was just wondering how that would go, knowing how Hannibal loves everything pleasing to the senses... (He can easily access things that taste, sound, smell and look awesome, but touches are not so easily accessible.) What I have in mind is something that would NOT be a prelude to sex, just a nice little impulsive gift Will would give Hannibal.
> 
> (Unfortunately, darling, I wrote the damn thing and then realized you were really looking more for Hannibal POV so this may not be at all what you wanted. Maybe I'll do a Hanni-POV version for you at some point too. Seemed a shame to just chuck this one, having written it, so here it is.)

In some ways, Will feels like he's just learning about touch now.

Which is ridiculous. He's a grown man, and pretty much any way that you can touch or be touched by someone, he's probably been party to at some point. It'd not like he doesn't know how to do it. It's more about not knowing _when_ to do it, or for how long, or how hard or soft. There was probably a class on that one day in childhood, and he must have been out sick. Everyone else just seems to know, and Will...doesn't. Never has. He's always let the other people in his life take the lead on that, from his parents having to ask for hugs in his childhood, to friends having to initiate casual touch, to romantic partners pretty much having to tell him "Do this thing, this way." He's a fast learner and there've never been any complaints once he's learned, but it still doesn't feel natural.

Oddly, with Hannibal, it's still not natural but there don't seem to be any consequences to the learning. He doesn't find himself worried that he'll brush up against Hannibal in passing and be considered awkward or creepy, or that he'll stand too close or too far away, or touch too hard or too soft. Hannibal wouldn't care. Hannibal wouldn't complain. Hannibal would probably let Will slice his throat from ear to ear and just be glad for the touch of Will's other hand on the back of his neck, baring him for the blade.

 _That_ should be creepy. It's not. It's freeing. There's no way he can get anything wrong; his existence is enough, in this odd little bubble of time they share while they wait for the manhunt to die down.

He becomes a devoted student. He learns that he can touch Hannibal just so, arm or hip, in their tiny kitchen to squeeze by him to reach for something. He learns how to be gentle with bandages and stitches so that his touch doesn't draw any hisses of pain. He learns that while Hannibal tends to Will's injuries, Will can rest a hand on his shoulder to steady himself, can grip hard if he needs to when the pain stings, without hurting Hannibal.

The cabin has a bed. It has a moth-eaten sofa. They try to take turns but after the fifth night, when Hannibal pops a stitch tossing restlessly on the lumpy sofa and bleeds onto it, destroying it even more thoroughly, Will mutters "fuck this, this is stupid" and from then on they share the bed. Which is also lumpy, but somewhat less so. And Will learns how to sleep with someone he's not sleeping with, except that learning appears to be an ongoing process because over the course of nights and weeks, they seem to wake up entangled more and more closely. Which seems like it should be awkward, but it somehow isn't, so Will just keeps learning. He learns to hold very still in the pale morning light until Hannibal wakes up, feeling the other man's heartbeat thrumming against his splayed fingers like a captured bird, feeling an arm draped over him or his arm draped over Hannibal depending on the day. He learns that their bodies do seem capable of touching without hurting, something he wouldn't necessarily have taken a bet on before.

And so somewhere in their fourth week at the cabin, when Hannibal comes in from hauling another load of firewood and collapses into a chair with the exhausted grunt of a man who's a bit unused to serious manual labor after three years of confinement, Will knows that he's not going to hurt Hannibal when he walks up behind the chair and drops his hands on Hannibal's shoulders. Lightly at first, fingers splaying downward toward Hannibal's chest, thumbs just resting at the nape of his neck. He rubs his thumbs in circles right around where he himself likes to be massaged by those few people he's allowed to do it, and draws a sigh from Hannibal that sounds like it comes from somewhere deeper than his lungs.

Will presses down a little harder, just enough for Hannibal to know he's being held in place, and says, "Enough, Hannibal. You're going to pull something if you do any more today, and we can't keep burning through the med kit. Besides, that's got to be enough to hold us for a few days, unless you're planning a bonfire."

"Pig roast, maybe." Hannibal's not fighting the hold, he's dropped his head low to give Will better access to his neck and shoulders. 

Will can learn this, too. He digs in with his thumbs, feeling the muscles underneath the warmth of Hannibal's skin, the tendons and sinews, Hannibal surprisingly human in his hands. He considers their fairly pathetic supply of canned and boxed pantry goods and says, "It would be the world's saddest luau. We could roast a can of tuna, maybe. I think we'd better save the wood for more practical uses."

"The meals I dreamed up in that place..." Hannibal trails off for a moment, pliant under Will's hands as they roam more freely over his shoulders, seeking the pain points and working at them, tentatively and then more firmly. Will's noticed Hannibal doesn't really ever name the BSHCI, it's just "that place." He can sympathize with that. "I had grand plans for my first taste of food in freedom. I'm afraid they did not involve this many things with the word "instant" on the box."

Will's only half listening, he's mostly focusing on his hands, Hannibal's muscles and shifts and sighs, learning this new way to touch. But he pays enough attention for a little snort of laughter. "Consider it good practice for life undercover. No one would ever suspect you of shopping in the prepared foods section of any store. Maybe I'll feed you canned soup forever."

Hannibal sort of...ripples...under Will's hands, and twists partway around to reach up with his left hand to cover Will's right, stilling its motion. He says calmly, "You don't have to, Will. This isn't anything a hot bath won't work out. I'm fine."

Will shrugs, a little uncomfortable - not with what he's doing, but with the talking about it. They haven't actually talked that much, about any of this. All he can offer up is, "I want to. Let me?"

Hannibal doesn't say no. Hannibal never says no, not since they came out of the ocean. Not since before that, really. Will's pretty sure Hannibal _could_ have stopped them going over the edge, if he'd wanted to. He didn't because he doesn't say no to Will anymore. Not since Will said _please_.

He takes his hand away, and he lets Will tug him out of his chair and over to the thick rug near the fire. He lets Will tug him out of his sweater and he goes willingly down, onto his stomach, face turned where he can watch the flames dance.

Will doesn't quite know where to start; there's suddenly a lot more to touch, and he's unsure what to do, what would ease Hannibal's aches and pains and give him back some measure of the peace he's brought Will in these weeks. He goes back to what he knows, Hannibal's neck and shoulders where the muscles have already relaxed some under his touch. He smooths his hands over the skin there, letting the warmth from the fire sink into Hannibal's skin and his own.

"What would you cook for us if you could?" It's a throwaway question, just something to keep Hannibal talking, but Will still adds, "Let's assume we're leaving humans off the menu for this first meal."

Hannibal's eyes slide shut, and Will's not sure if the pleasure that seems to indicate is about the massage, or the warmth, or the idea of a proper meal, or the idea of Will's newfound ability to so casually discuss Hannibal's less mentionable hobbies. It doesn't really matter, for Will's purposes. He starts to work down Hannibal's back, skirting carefully around the tape that's holding some of Hannibal's bandages in place. He leans his weight into the work, and decides the answering groan is a good one.

"Assuming we're working from conventional ingredients, I thought perhaps venison. Pheasant. Something appropriately woodsy for our surroundings. Roasted. _Mph_."

Will takes that noise as a good one, too, and redoubles his effort on the tensed muscle he's just found twitching in Hannibal's side. His hands slide more easily, now, as he can read the responses of Hannibal's shifting muscles and the line of his jaw relaxing. He thinks maybe this is something he could be good at, with some practice. He wonders how long it's been since anyone touched Hannibal, really touched, outside of medical exams and shackles and straitjackets.

He skirts his fingers toward the brand, years old now, no longer angry, but still terribly visible, terribly vulnerable. He feels a small phantom throb of sympathy pain along his own worst scar, the slash on his stomach. He doesn't touch so much as he skims his fingers just above the skin and asks, "Does it hurt?"

Hannibal's silent for a moment and then offers only, "Not anymore. There's not much sensation left."

Will does touch, then, lightly and then harder to see when Hannibal will feel it. He knows by the tiniest flicker of a muscle near his eye. He presses his whole palm over the mark, covering it entirely, and then asks, "You'll tell me if I hurt you?"

"You won't hurt me." 

Will's not entirely sure if that means "Nothing you can do would hurt me" or "I trust you not to hurt me." He doesn't ask for the clarification. He just returns to running his hands over Hannibal's back and shoulders, comfortable now, leaning his weight into the motions, smooth and easy. Over and over again, almost meditative, until he's not sure which of them he's trying to ease.

He loses time at some point, lapses into the siren song of flickering firelight and undemanding intimacy and the ability to touch without fear. However long it goes on, Hannibal doesn't complain, and when Will shakes himself back to full awareness he finds Hannibal's just about asleep, pliant and boneless, golden in the light of the fire that's dying down to embers now.

He gets up as quietly as he can, not to disturb Hannibal. He gathers up their dinner dishes and leaves them in the sink to be deal with in the morning. He turns out the lamps.

He thinks about waking Hannibal up and trying to get him up to bed. He thinks about leaving him with a blanket and going up to the bedroom on his own.

In the end, Will decides he doesn't want to go back to sleeping alone. He fetches a blanket and curls up next to Hannibal on the rug, which is at least as comfortable as some of the places they stayed that first week on the run, and probably more comfortable than Hannibal's bed at the BSHCI. He reaches out one hand again to cover Hannibal's brand, and he closes his eyes and lets his world narrow down to the steady rise and fall of the air Hannibal breathes, and he sleeps steady and without nightmares.


	5. World Enough and Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: I'd love to read about Hannibal growing old. I mean I always think of him as a strong beast in his prime, but if we're being honest, he wouldn't be able to keep it up for eternity. So how would he grow old? (With/without Will?) Would it be sad? Graceful? Or would he die in a last battle before old age?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELL THANKS FOR THIS VERY UPSETTING PROMPT. (Which, to be fair, I’d always intended to write at some point, so you’re just jogging me to do it sooner and to do it short-ish-form instead of tearing my heart out with like a fifteen-chapter angst fic, so probably I should thank you.)

Hannibal hides it as long as he can. He’s grown unaccustomed to lying to Will, but he can still do it when the situation calls for it. And he still has the medical knowledge to help him maintain appearances for as long as possible.

He’d have a harder time keeping up the charade if they were still hunting, but that’s more or less a thing of the past these days. They never explicitly discussed it, and there’s always the chance they might do it again, but gradually the time between kills stretched from months to years and it slipped into the background of their shared life. What had seemed so consuming and vital in the early years seems less so, now. Their lives are quieter now. Other things are more important.

Not that they don’t still talk about it, sometimes. In front of the fire or over dinner or in bed or on walks, Will stepping carefully with a dodgy knee these days, Hannibal a little short of breath, even the dogs greying around their muzzles, but all of them still enjoying the rambles their aging bodies will allow. Will still says _remember when we…_ or Hannibal _you were so lovely when…_ They revisit many of their kills, but most often return to that first, to the Red Dragon and the bluffs.

Sometimes it sneaks up unintentionally. Last month Will had cleaned out the chest freezer and found a single vacuum sealed liver, far in the back under an accumulation of other food where it must have survived the last few clean-outs unnoticed. Neither of them could even remember who it could have belonged to or when they’d put it there, it must have been there so long. Will had laughed at the absurdity until he had been bent double, nearly crying with it.

They hadn’t been able to quite imagine either cooking with it after leaving it there so long, or throwing out what might be their last trophy, so in the end it had just gone back into the deep freeze. Hannibal imagines when he’s gone, Will may finally get rid of it.

He’s considered whether he may also end up in the chest freezer. He assumes not. He suspects he’ll end up in the rose garden, where they bury the dogs when they pass. Will never really did more than tolerate the eating, for Hannibal’s sake. And anyway, Hannibal’s tainted meat. 

If it had been anyone else he probably would have smelled the distinctive sweet-sour cancer smell sooner, but you live with your own scent so much every day that a change can sneak up on you.

Not that it matters. Even if he wanted to, Hannibal can’t exactly show up at the nearest hospital for a course of chemotherapy. His false identities don’t extend to things like health insurance, paying cash would get suspicious, and at some point someone would recognize him. They slipped off the most-wanted list some years ago but there are still bulletins circulating with faces and identifying marks. The long-healed scar of the Verger brand is still on those bulletins. He won’t risk spending his final weeks or months in prison, or a courtroom, or anywhere but with Will.

He wouldn’t take the aggressive treatment anyway. His body is poisoning itself; no need to add to the poison. He’ll finish out his life here, high in the mountains, where he has everything he needs. He’ll hide it as long as the painkillers last, or as long as he can keep the doses low enough that Will can’t tell he’s taking them. 

Will’s going to be furious when he figures it out, Hannibal already knows. They’ll have a knock-down, drag-out fight, which may be fun; they still bicker constantly about every little thing but haven’t had a really good fight in quite a while. Will’s still beautiful when he’s angry. Hannibal would like to see that at least one more time.

Then they’ll make up. He’d like to do that one more time, too. And Hannibal hopes Will, once he knows, will understand the care Hannibal’s taken these recent weeks to fill their days with good memories. They’ll spend whatever time is left making more of them together.

It’s not a bad way to go. He died all those years ago, on the cliff’s edge, when he decided he wanted Will’s arms, even falling, more than he wanted to stay alive. The rest has been, as he told Alana so long ago, borrowed moments. A bright dazzling string of borrowed moments, stretched out into years and decades, and he can’t bring himself to find it unfair if he’s finally reaching the end of the string.

He looks out the window into the yard, where Will is throwing an endless series of sticks and balls for their remaining two dogs. He’ll be occupied there a while longer. 

Hannibal has time to take another pill, wash it down with a glass of wine (really good wine; he’s starting to think what tips Will off may be that Hannibal is suddenly drinking the very best of their collection), and start dinner. He may have time for a nap while the roast cooks. Maybe he can coax Will into napping with him. 

For now, he has time.


	6. Stay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A prompt for "things you said at 1 a.m.", late-season-2-in-Hannilbal's-bedroom, the-fisherman-is-not-so-sure-he-actually-wants-to-catch-the-fish-anymore style. Warning, for, I guess, general sadness? Tumblr tells me I made them sad. I'd say sorry, but we all know I'm not.
> 
> (Originally posted [over here](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com/post/139108164256/ask-and-you-shall-receive-hannigram-1)).

“Stay.”

Hannibal doesn’t mean to say it out loud.

Will doesn’t stay. Will never stays. That’s not the next step in the dance they’re doing.

The next step is for Will to finish buttoning his shirt. He may or may not say goodnight, and then he'll leave.  Tomorrow or the next night he’ll be back for dinner, over which they may or may not talk about Will’s casework, certainly will talk in vague non-incriminating circles about Hannibal’s role in sending Will to the BSHCI, and will not talk at all about the fact that after dinner they’ll come back up to this bedroom and bite bruises into each other’s skin.

That’s the rhythm.  That’s the dance.  They’ll keep doing it until one of them trips and falls and then god help them both.

But it’s long past midnight, and Will’s rough handling has sanded off all of Hannibal’s sharp edges, and something soft and exposed underneath gets the upper hand and he says: “Stay with me.”

Will’s fingers trip just slightly over his buttons. The tiniest error.  Maybe he’s tired of dancing, too.

“I _can’t_ , Hannibal.”   _The dogs_ , he says. _Jack_ , he means. _I’m meant to be catching you, and fucking you is an acceptable way to do that, but sleeping in your arms is not_ , he means.  They both know it.

“It’s late. Stay this once. You can put on your armor again in the morning.”   _Please_ , Hannibal means. They both know that, too.

Will freezes, and closes his eyes, and thinks.  After a moment, his fingers move again.  

They unbutton.

A ceasefire, then. For a night.

Hannibal considers moving to help Will slip the shirt back off but he’s afraid if he touches him at all right now, the fragile accord will break.  He holds perfectly still until Will is undressed again, under the blankets with him, and the lights turned out.

Will moves against him slowly, so gently, and it feels more dangerous than anything else. Worse than Hannibal’s back where Will scraped bloody lines. Worse than Will’s shoulder must feel where Hannibal all but dislocated it pressing him to the bed earlier.

Will’s so careful as he slides into Hannibal’s arms, like it feels just as dangerous to him. But all he says is, “Don’t try to make me breakfast.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” he says, and means, and tightens his arms around Will so imperceptibly they can both pretend he’s not doing it.

He’d stay awake all night if he could but he’s certain Will won’t sleep until he does. So he closes his eyes and lets himself slip, and dream, and set the dance aside until dawn.


	7. Of Grass Stains and Stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This ficlet brought to you by a "things you said under the stars and in the grass" prompt, and my desire to take "things you said" too literally and see if I could write some dialogue-only smut-adjacent fic. This may or may not be taking place in the early days of the Last Four Years ‘verse, I haven’t decided.

“There, isn’t that better?”

“We could have looked at the stars from inside our comfortable, clean tent. There’s a rock under my leg.”

“Tents with sunroofs are not _camping_ , Hannibal. Just look. When was the last time you really looked at the stars?”

“Alana’s tender care did not include stargazing expeditions.”

“So look up. Beautiful, aren’t they?”

“You’re not even looking.”

“No, I’m not. I’ve seen them. I know what they look like. _You_ , I’m still memorizing.”

“ _Will_. If you’re not even going to look, why are we – _oh_.”

“Eyes on the sky. Not on me.”

“Mm. I. Ah. They’re very clear, without the city lights. I recognize, _oh_ , a few… Only a few constellations.”

“You can put your hands in my hair if you need to. Or my shoulders. Nowhere else. Eyes on the sky. I want you to feel like you’re falling off the edge of the earth. Like I’m all that’s anchoring you.”

“I always do. If you’re trying to prove, _oh_ , some kind of point…”

“No point. I just want you out here, not in your stupid tent. Shh, love. It’s going to be fine. Don’t think about the grass stains.  Think about the stars.”

“ _Oh_ ….”


	8. A good way to go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Purely indulgent fluff, but what else do you expect when sending me a **things you said when we were the happiest we ever were** prompt?
> 
> Although I will note as I did [over on Tumblr](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com/post/139315761506/another-missive-from-the-prompt-mines) that this is a bit of a cheat, because we all know the happiest Hannibal ever was, was “it’s beautiful,” and we already know there’s no more dialogue there because ~~Will, baby, you gotta work on less drastic problem-solving impulses~~ of reasons. Let’s just say this is probably the next time after that when they’re both really happy at the same time, okay?

It’s not exactly an  _ introductory _ kiss, but then they’re a bit past introductions at this point.

It takes Hannibal’s brain a few moments to catch up to the rest of him. His brain still thinks Will is across the small table in their dingy motel room having a very calm and rational conversation about their next steps.  Meanwhile his mouth is suddenly very aware that Will brushed his teeth recently enough that his lips are faintly minty, and his torso is sending up a jagged flare of pain where Will bumped into his slowly-healing gut wound in all but leaping into Hannibal’s lap, and as for said lap, well. It’s possible that some of the reason Hannibal’s brain hasn’t quite caught up is that most of its blood supply is migrating south at the moment.

Hannibal thinks maybe when he parts his lips it’s to breathe or to say “What is this?” or maybe just to say Will’s name, but apparently Will takes it as an invitation because his tongue runs neatly along the edge of Hannibal’s lower lip as if it’s right at home there.  As if it’s not so much exploring for the first time, as revisiting a path well-worn in imagination, if not in fact.

Then Will’s tongue slips on in and makes itself at home in Hannibal’s mouth, and Hannibal stops caring what this is, because whatever it is, he wants to live and die in this moment where it’s happening.  

He lets one hand lift and come to rest gentle against Will’s throat, fingertips just brushing his jaw on the side without the stitches. He presses lightly, just so, just to see if Will can be made to tilt his head a bit.  Will goes with it, letting their mouths fit even more closely together, and Hannibal finally catches up enough to kiss Will in earnest.  

And that’s when Hannibal learns that apparently Will makes the most amazing little  _ sounds _ when he’s being kissed properly.

Hannibal suddenly has a vivid memory of Will walking into his house like he owned the place, shaking rain from his hair like a bedraggled puppy, and saying  _ I kissed Alana Bloom _ .  Will would not have made those sounds when kissing Alana, he’s quite certain. Much less his  _ wife. _ But just the thought of someone else having heard Will sounding like this snaps Hannibal’s body and brain back into the same circuit.

He has no idea what’s happening here, but he knows that he wants to hear more of those sounds, and he doesn’t want anyone else to hear them, ever again.  And that’s… that’s a problem because… because…

Oh.  Right.  Because just before Will pounced, Hannibal had been trying to offer him money and the use of a safehouse, to use as a launchpad for whatever it is he wants to do next.  He’d been trying to somehow fumblingly say, “If you’re going to try to go back to you life, your window on that is closing fast.”  To keep himself from saying, “I’ll let you go if you must, to her or anywhere else, but please don’t go.  Please come with me.”

He’s not even sure what words he actually said, but they must have been the right ones because he’s running out of air fast.  If this is another of Will’s murder-suicide attempts, he likes this one much better. This would be a good way to go.  

Someone’s shaking, and in the end maybe that’s the only reason the kiss ends. It leaves them panting, and Hannibal thinks at first he’s the one trembling.  He  _ feels _ like he is.  But it turns out that maybe he’s just lost track of where he ends and Will begins, because what’s actually happening is that Will is laughing.

Tight-wound, self-conscious Will Graham, who tried to murder Hannibal ten days ago (but who’s counting?), is sitting across Hannibal’s lap, lips reddened and bitten, and he’s laughing the most delighted belly laugh Hannibal’s ever heard.  It’s confusing and charming and Hannibal has no idea what to do with it.

But Will doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.  So Hannibal lets himself put steadying hands on Will’s hips.  Which of them he’s steadying he couldn’t say, since he himself feels like he’s just sailed over the edge of the known universe. He tries to wait, while his heart makes a good attempt at exploding out of his chest.

Will eventually manages to sputter to a halt, eyes wet and bright with tears from laughing so hard, and to gasp out, “Okay. Okay, so  _ that _ works just fine between us, I guess.”  Hannibal isn’t sure what face he makes at that, but whatever it is nearly makes Will lose it again.  With visible effort, Will manages to restrain himself to just a little choked snickering sound.  “Christ, I wish you could see your face right now. If I’d known I could shut you up this easily I might have done that years ago.”

At that, Hannibal makes a heroic effort to find some words.  It’s not easy.  He’s still very aware of the warm, solid weight of Will in his lap, and the throbbing pain from his wound has faded, and this is … good.  This is good.  Hannibal could sit here like this all day.  But instead he manages to ask, “What are you playing at, Will?”

“I’m not playing at anything.  I’m trying to make it very clear that you’re not getting rid of me that easily. You can’t buy me off with one of your houses.  I bet you don’t even have a single one with a fenced-in yard.”

He’s almost right, but not quite.  Hannibal admits, “Most of them were acquired before I knew you.  The newest one’s in New Hampshire and there’s a yard.  And a river.  There’s not a boat yet but there could be.”

“And you’re trying to ship me off there on my own. Without you.”

“I’m not  _ trying _ to do anything except--”

“Shut up, Hannibal.”

Will kisses him again, and this time Hannibal’s right there with him. Neither of them is exactly in a condition for anything more energetic, between their various injuries, but it’s not for a lack of wanting to.  Hannibal feels half undone already, just from this, and he’s almost certain from the pressure of Will’s hips rolling gently against him that he’s not alone in that.

No. No, he’s not sending Will off alone to New Hampshire or back to his wife or anywhere else.  Ten minutes ago he could have, if absolutely necessary.  Now it’s out of the question. 

Will knew it would be, and that this was the shortest and surest way to end the attempt.  That’s the only explanation for this.

Will wants to stay with him.

The knowledge bubbles up through Hannibal and fills him with a fierce joy that makes him want to hold Will more tightly against him.  So he does. Because he can. Because this is his to do, now.

When air finally becomes an issue again, he says, “All right. We’ll go together.”

“Damn straight.”  Will’s smiling down at him warmly, fondly, gently enough to break Hannibal’s heart and mend it in the same instant.  “New Hampshire’s fine to start with.  Or wherever.  We’ve got a lot to figure out, so let’s go somewhere and do that, okay? Stop fighting me on things you don’t even want to win.”

Stubborn, frustrating, man.  Hannibal’s never seen him quite like this - as if something in his fall and return from the ocean broke something loose in him.  Something freer and more confident.  Or maybe it’s just what comes of having Hannibal wrapped this tightly around his little finger.  Which he is.  Hopelessly. He has been for a long time, but now they both know it.  That’s probably going to cause Hannibal a lot of trouble down the road but he can’t bring himself to regret it right now.

It’s all he can do just to say “All right” instead of “yes, dear.”  And he should be horrified at that, he really should. Or they should get back to the “planning next steps” thing.

Instead, they just stay that way for a long time, smiling at each other like idiots, sharing smaller, less fraught kisses and gentle touches now, trying to figure out what’s possible around their various wounds and why it took so long to get here.


	9. between your teeth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A **things you said between your teeth** prompt from hannigramandromancek. In which Will is maybe not _entirely_ ready to just jump straight from cliff-dive to snugglebunny Murder Husband without a fight.

The first week is easy. That is to say, it’s painful and bloody and terrifying and dangerous, short on sleep and long on adrenaline, but all things considered: easy.   **  
**

They run, and they hide, and they patch each other up as well as they can with the available supplies.  They sleep a bit, here and there, but never enough for Will to feel as if his brain is anything like functional.  (Hannibal, damn the man, seems to be perfectly capable of getting by on three hours of sleep.  Will would have considered stabbing him just to get another hour’s sleep on the second day if he’d had full use of his right hand, and if he weren’t already worried about running low on medical supplies.)

Will doesn’t even try to think.  He just survives, and that’s simple and easy and has a strange sort of purity to it.

In the second week they come to rest temporarily in one of Hannibal’s boltholes, this one smaller and shabbier and never intended for lengthy stays or for two occupants.  But hot water and canned food and another stash of painkillers seem like a minor miracle.

They spend the better part of two days just recovering, sleeping and eating meals cobbled together from dry goods, getting properly clean, tending to injuries, and checking in on what information is publicly available about their “deaths”.  They don’t talk much; Will’s too exhausted and Hannibal seems to be taking his cues from Will.

Somewhere around the third day, the fog lifts enough for Will to take some stock of his situation.  Once it does, he immediately wishes it would come back. Because this is entirely too fucking domestic. 

It’s a tired, pained sort of domestic, but nonetheless.  Will keeps waking up in the mornings on the sofa with a blanket tucked over him that he didn’t fall asleep with.  He keeps finding himself intentionally keeping quiet in the kitchen so he doesn’t wake Hannibal, who seems to stay up later and then sleep later than Will does now that they’re more or less safe for the moment.  Last night Hannibal had managed to coax Will into enough words all in a row to almost qualify as a conversation, and he’d made one of his puns, and Will had laughed before he’d been able to stop himself.  Hannibal had looked so damn pleased that it had made Will happy, briefly, to have made Hannibal that happy.

And with a clearer head, he knows none of this is what he wants.

Or at least, it’s not what he _wants_ to want.

He tried to pull Hannibal into a murder-suicide swan dive nine days ago.  He’s not entirely sure it was the wrong thing to do, or that he won’t do it again, given half a chance.  

And so he reacts maybe more strongly than he should when Hannibal joins him at the table after dinner and tries to start a conversation about _what’s next?_  Hannibal’s halfway through describing the place he has in mind for them to go to next - the location, the multiple bedrooms so Will doesn’t have to sleep on the sofa anymore, the wine cellar because of _course_ he keeps stashes of wine scattered up and down the Eastern seaboard - when Will just snaps.

He’s been clenching his jaw so tightly he’s nearly grinding his teeth, and he manages to spit out, “You haven’t even asked me if I _want_ to go anywhere with you.  Was three years not enough to teach you to stop assuming you know what I want?”

Hannibal looks so exactly like a misbehaving puppy who’s just been scolded that Will feels sorry, and almost apologizes before he catches himself. Because he is not going to apologize, not for that.  A moment later he’s glad, because Hannibal’s expression flickers away quickly to be replaced by something more familiar to Will.  Something a little harder and cooler and angrier all at once.  His features settle into one of his old masks and he says stiffly, “I apologize for presuming. You may leave at any time when you are strong enough to do so, of course. I will not try to follow you. I’d ask you for the same courtesy.”

Will’s shoulder hurts. His cheek hurts. There’s a headache starting behind his eyes and he’s afraid he’s about to say something irrevocable.  

He takes a deep breath and counts to five, and he still feels like starting a fight. He’s suddenly so unbelievably angry at Hannibal’s presumptions, at himself for failing so utterly on the cliff top, at the world in general.  

Before he can do something he’ll regret, he levers himself up from the table with his good hand and says, “I’m not ready to talk about this. I’m going to bed. If you want to make plans, we can talk tomorrow, but stop making assumptions and _ask_ me what I want.  And maybe you should take some time to think really hard about whether I’m the safest person for you to go road-tripping with.  I’m not sure either of us would survive another fall.”

Hannibal stares back at him in that particular blank, unreadable way he has and doesn’t respond.

Will _wants_ a response; he wants it the way he’d wanted Francis Dolarhyde’s blood.  He wants to rip a response from Hannibal with his teeth.  It suddenly feels extremely unsafe to stay in this room.  So he adds, “I’m taking the bed tonight.”  And then he gets out fast, before something terrible can happen between them.

He walks to the bedroom as quickly as he can and shuts the door behind him. He locks it, and doesn’t think too hard about why.

It’s too early to sleep but he stretches out on the bed anyway and prepares to stare at the ceiling for long sleepless hours, until he knows what the answers will be to the questions Hannibal will ask him in the morning.


	10. Bloodless Sacrifice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not precisely a prompted fic so much as a little brain hiccup that emerged from [but-the-kid-is-not-my-son musing about just how badly it fucked Hannibal up to wait for three years without a word from Will](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com/post/139449183046/but-the-kid-is-not-my-son-damnslippyplanet). But someone asked for more of this, and I have no immediate plans in this direction but might write it someday, so I'm dropping it into the prompt compilation so I can find it again should the urge arise!

He wasn’t surprised when the first year came and went. He hadn’t really expected Will to break *right* away. Where would the satisfaction have been in that? Where’s the value in a bloodless sacrifice?

He kept busy. He had books to read and the judicial system to subvert and academics to torment. For a few glorious days he got to see Will across a courtroom. Ragged, with eyes like bruises. No one had been feeding him properly. He stared fixedly at his hands, never anywhere near Hannibal. Hannibal had almost regretted hiring a lawyer instead of defending himself, so he could have forced Will to answer his questions. But he’d contented himself with cataloging Will’s litany of half-truths, for later analysis.

He’d thought Will would come to him in the second year. The passing of seasons would bring them back to winter again, and the chill would remind Will, and he’d come.

Or he would write. Call, perhaps. At the very least Hannibal expected some sort of message passed through Alana. Maybe something so subtle she wouldn’t even know she was being used as a pawn in their game. She never really had.

It was only when the spring arrived that he began to wonder if he might be the only person left seated at the game board. Whether, perhaps, Will had finally found someone to feed him and smooth his ragged edges.

Alana gave him no clues, and he stopped fishing for them when she seemed to be enjoying it too much. He waited in the foyer and lit candles and felt his certainty slipping as the days slipped by.

It was only when the third year started that he began to wonder what happens to a god when his sacrifices stop arriving altogether.


	11. up to the light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompter says: If you're taking prompts, how about Will asking but not asking Hannibal about his time spend with Bedelia? He can't stand not knowing but he is afraid to know!

 

Will knows there are things that Hannibal does that are only for him.  He sees it every time he wakes up first, when he stays in their bed and watches the sunrise spread tendrils across the bed until it reaches Hannibal’s eyes and he stirs. Every time, for all the weeks and months of their headlong run into the rest of their lives, Will catches the same ripple of emotions on Hannibal’s face when he wakes.  Confusion, disbelief, and wonder all live in Hannibal’s eyes in those moments before he catches himself and reaches for some less vulnerable expression.

Will knows those moments are only his, without having to ask.  He’s quite sure Hannibal’s woken up in a variety of beds with a variety of people, but that he’s never before gotten so lost as to wake up without his mask firmly tied in place.

He knows it’s only for him that Hannibal tells stories of his childhood, not often but sometimes when the mood is right and the lights are low, that he exposes the raw nerve of his memory and offers it up as a gift.

It’s only for him that Hannibal eyes dogs on the street as if trying to figure out what their appeal could be and what sort of a creature might fit into their lives.

It’s for Will, only ever for Will, that the words _I love you_ actually mean that, pressed into his collarbone or the tender skin of his thighs.  Hannibal’s said them, oh how he’s said them, but they always meant something else: _I am playing a game with you_ or _You will do_ or _I believe this is what a real person would say right now._  Only for Will do the words take on weight and meaning.

And yet.

There are other things Hannibal does with the ease of long practice that Will knows, without knowing exactly how he knows, are not entirely his.

When Hannibal lathers and rinses and caresses his hair in their overlarge bathtub, Will knows it is a sacrament and a gift but one that is not entirely for him.  This is something Hannibal does, he senses, for his own reasons and probably for all of his lovers.  It doesn’t stop Will melting under such treatment but it also doesn’t stop his imagination conjuring the images.  Hannibal would have done this for Alana, for Bedelia, for faceless nameless others.

When Hannibal teaches him how to dance, haltingly and disastrously and with a great deal of laughter, he remembers the photographs that had surfaced after Hannibal’s capture of his time in Italy.  He remembers reading that Dr. and Mrs. Fell had danced beautifully, dazzling crowds, moving like a single creature.

More often he wonders what they talked about alone, how they passed the time, all those days and nights in Florence.

He tries not to think about it. Mostly he doesn’t.  Both Will and Hannibal are adults, with adult pasts, and jealousy simmers close enough to their surfaces all the time without any additional encouragement.  The man who married and loved and in some way always will love Molly has no right to care that Hannibal took Bedelia dancing. He has no right to ask whether the palazzo’s second bedroom was only ever for show.

But he can’t pretend he doesn’t notice the day he finds Hannibal carefully copying a recipe into a greeting card.  He wonders if Hannibal annotates the recipes for Bedelia the way he sometimes does in his own cookbooks, in his graceful, curving hand.  He wonders if he sends her recipes he wishes to make from her flesh, or recipes from meals they shared in the past.  If each one evokes a particular memory shared between them - a dinner, an extravagant weekend breakfast, a midnight snack.

Hannibal sometimes likes to make elaborate midnight snacks.  On a few memorable occasions when Will’s been too worn out to move, Hannibal’s brought platters back to bed to feed him by hand.  Will can’t imagine Bedelia in his position, fucked-out and pliant and so composureless that she would have just opened her mouth like a baby bird to be fed.  Not Bedelia, crusher of weakness in herself as well as others.

And yet what does he truly know about their time behind the veil?  Little enough, really.  His imagination is not a trustworthy guide; it births horror and beauty together and cannot always tell its twin children apart.

He swallows the question down with the others unasked, and asks only, “Is it her birthday?”

Hannibal looks up and smiles for Will, always for Will, he may have had a smile for Bedelia but it couldn’t possibly have been this one. He replies, “In a few weeks. It will take some time for the remailing service, so best to send it early. Rabbit this year.”

Will finds himself asking, even if it doesn’t come out as a question: “You didn’t send me birthday cards.”

“You would have burned them unread.” It’s not a rebuke, just an observation.

“I would have _kept_ them unread. I might have taken them out sometimes and looked at the envelope. Held them up to the light. Tried to break my own rule without really breaking it.”  It’s a mildly embarrassing statement but nonetheless the truth, and they tell each other the truth now, mostly.  Truth, or silences when the truth is too painful, but never lies, not anymore.

Hannibal sighs and sets the pen aside and comes to Will and enfolds him in arms that can snap a neck but would never snap Will’s. “The fire would have been cleaner. You torture yourself needlessly.”

“She doesn’t burn them,” Will says, and that’s another thing he just knows. “She turns them over to Jack but first she makes copies. She keeps the copies. She knows you’ll go someday and you’ll expect her to have them.”

“I know. Maybe she’ll publish them one day. I’m sure she’s been offered enough money.”  Hannibal sounds amused at the idea, but his voice turns serious again when he tells Will, “You don’t have to hold me up to the light, you know.  If there are things you want to know, ask.  I’ll tell you.”

He would, too. Hannibal, who still cries silently when they speak of Mischa but who does speak of her now, would tell Will about Florence if he asked.

Someday he’ll ask.  For today it’s enough to draw Hannibal from his recipe book.  Will rests his head against Hannibal’s heart and listens for its steady wordless truths.


	12. Day One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A "things you didn't say at all" prompt fill. Fair warning. You know how sometimes I write fluffy and sometimes I write sad? This little post-Digestivo vignette is…less with the fluffy. Will Graham Is Not Having A Nice Day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huh. This one is from ages ago but it's just been brought to my attention that it never made it into the prompt compilation. So here it is for completeness' sake.

One of the police cars whisks Hannibal away immediately; no one’s risking leaving him unattended in a backseat, handcuffs or no.  Will could have told them that they might as well have come in for a cup of tea and left Hannibal with the keys to the handcuffs and the car; he still wouldn’t go anywhere.  He’s exactly where he wants to be.

But no one asks Will for his opinion on why Hannibal has apparently spent the past several hours in Will’s shed waiting for an armed escort to his own incarceration. They do ask Will some other questions, and he answers them with something close to honesty about the facts, and with a pack of shameless lies about his motives.  

He’s grateful Jack didn’t stay; Jack would see through him in a heartbeat.  He’s sure Jack will be asking him all these questions again, but in a day or two he’ll be stronger and able to hold up under that scrutiny too.  Right now he feels raw. There are too many people and too many lights and he can _feel_ Hannibal moving away from him as if there’s a rubber band between them, stretching tighter and tighter with the miles.  It’s what he wanted, or what he said he wanted, but try and tell that to the tightness in his chest.

Eventually what remains of his voice gives out and he’s left blessedly alone. He can still hear voices outside, and clattering out in the shed, but he draws the curtains and locks the door and pretends to be alone.

He lies down on top of the blankets, still dressed, and stares at the ceiling. The rubber band stretches thin; Will feels weak with it.  They’ll be nearly in Baltimore by now.  Maybe there already, driving fast with the sirens on, Hannibal meek as a lamb in the back seat.  Somewhere else altogether in his head, no doubt.  

Will wonders if Hannibal feels the connection stretching thin too.  He wonders how long it will take him to stop feeling it.  Whether it will fade slowly, or rupture with a painful snap, or if he’ll just wake up one day and realize he hasn’t thought about Hannibal in a day, or a week.  Perhaps, in some unimaginable future, he’ll make it a month.

He starts a letter in his head.  He can’t seem to get any farther than the first sentence, and every first sentence he thinks of contradicts the one before it.

_Dear Hannibal._

* * *

_Hannibal._

* * *

_You unbelievable bastard._

* * *

_I meant all of it._

* * *

_I don’t know if I meant any of it._

* * *

_I’m lying awake and I know everything they’ll be doing to you right now - the intake, the questions, the examinations - because I’ve been there, and you did that to me, and god damn it, I am not going to feel sorry for you._

* * *

_I may not have wanted to look for you but I wanted to know you were out there somewhere. I really thought you might run. Was it so important, to get the last word?_

* * *

_I woke up once, somewhere in the snow. The drugs were still in my system and I couldn’t move. I was cold all over except where you were holding me up.  It felt like you were lurching, as if you could barely keep moving forward.  You could have left me there, in the snow, and been free._

* * *

_I thought I heard you singing, before I passed out again.  Were you singing to keep yourself awake and moving, or were you singing to me? Was I just hallucinating?  I didn’t recognize the song.  I wish I knew what it was._

* * *

_I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with myself tomorrow, or the day after that. I didn’t think past finding you._

* * *

_I’m not sure which of us won.  Just once, Hannibal, I’d like to know._

* * *

Eventually Will gives up on the letter he already knew he wasn’t going to write or send.  He’s not going to call.  He’s not going to visit.  He won’t be able to avoid seeing Hannibal at trial but he can probably avoid talking to him.

He knows lots of things he’s not going to do next.  Maybe, if he sorts through enough negatives and clears out enough broken shards, he’ll find something in himself that’s left whole, a path he can take, and then he’ll know what his next step is.

For now he turns over onto his side, ignoring his various aches and pains as he does it, and stares at the chair where Hannibal was sitting a few hours ago. It feels like longer, already.

He drifts fitfully in and out of sleep, and the song he can’t name follows him into dreams he’s grateful not to remember the next day.

He wakes up in the morning still aching with wounds both visible and invisible, and the song he doesn’t know still in his head. He tries not to wonder whether Hannibal’s awake yet.  Days start early, where Hannibal’s going to be for the foreseeable future.

It’s day one of the rest of Will’s life.  

He wonders how long it will be until he stops counting.


	13. S1 AU Pt 1: Indiscretion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Can I ask for Will shoving his cold feet between Hannibal’s legs?
> 
> Which is a nice simple prompt but the emotional idiots insisted on being allowed to talk for like 1200 words first so, you know... sigh. Consider this a Season One AU where Hannigram get together the night of the Tobias Budge Stag Statue Office Massacre. Pretty much nothing but fluff 'n feelings here. Also for some reason Will has a new dog.
> 
> (Continued in the next few chapters of this compilation)

Will doesn’t generally tolerate late night wakeups, but Marlon is a new addition to the pack and not trained yet in their schedule or in asking politely to go out. So Will can’t get too irritated when he wakes with a jolting of the bed as Marlon lands next to him, all wet nose and attention-seeking whine. He’ll learn soon enough.

He’s not quite awake enough to manage a proper stern “off” command or a redirect, but what the hell, he’s awake, he can let the damn dog out.  He shoves the covers back and sits up with a yawn, and it’s only when the cold air hits him in a rush that he remembers he’s not dressed.

Or alone.

Fuck.

It’s not… he doesn’t… Will doesn’t _do_  this, not like _this._ Not like anything, really, for longer than he cares to remember.

And yet he’d said “I feel like I’ve dragged you into my world”, and Hannibal had said “I got here on my own” and then proceeded to more or less invite himself the rest of the way into Will’s world, evening, house, and bed in the space of a few hours.  And he’d done it so damn smoothly Will hadn’t even quite caught the moments when _professional concern_ became _friendly interest_ became _I thought Budge killed you_ became _may I?_ became _I want_  became, well. Hannibal Lecter asleep and bare-ass naked in Will’s bed.

Will has no idea what to do with any of that at this exact moment so he focuses on the next five minutes.  He can let Marlon out.  That seems like a nice, manageable task.  He’ll do that.  

Then he’ll maybe get lucky and a sinkhole will open up and swallow him before he has to decide whether to get back into that bed afterwards.  

He finds his underwear easily enough but has no idea where his shirt went.  He can’t even quite remember where it came off.  Somewhere over by the kitchen, maybe?  Fuck it. Least of his problems at this moment.  If anyone’s standing in his front yard at 3 a.m. in the middle of winter they can enjoy the damn show.

He opens the front door quietly and lets Marlon out; the rest of the pack look at him curiously but don’t follow.  They know the rules.  Will follows Marlon and stands on the porch trying not to hyperventilate. He tries not to remember that twenty-four hours ago he didn’t know what it felt like to kiss his psychiatrist.  To do a lot more than that, actually, but it seems to be the kissing that’s sticking with him at this exact moment. If he’d thought about kissing Hannibal before, it wouldn’t have surprised him to realize the man kisses like he does everything else - thorough, confident, leisurely, more than a touch of the show-off in him even in that.

Why does he know this now?  What is he supposed to do with this information after whatever form of awkward morning-after they’re going to have in a few hours?  Hannibal being Hannibal, he’ll probably cook breakfast for them both before he lets Will down politely. He’ll chalk it up to the stressful circumstances of the day. Apologies. A referral. A gentleman’s agreement not to complicate matters further by making anyone else aware of their indiscretion. He’ll almost certainly say “indiscretion,” it’s so much more polite sounding than “mistake.”

There’ll be a return to normalcy and Will’s just going to have to forget the things he knows now that he didn’t know twelve hours ago.

Will stands on the porch nearly-naked and wraps his arms around himself and shivers and tries to stop thinking.  Tries to just let the cold and the wind scour him clean and empty and numb.

He stands out there for long minutes until it’s Marlon who’s whining to go back inside where it’s warm, and then Will can’t put it off any longer. He lets them both back inside and locks the door and scans the room until he finally finds his shirt, hanging improbably off a lamp. He tugs it back on, flimsy armor but better than nothing.

He’s seriously considering spending the rest of the night on the couch (or in the upstairs bedroom he never uses, or hell, some of the dog beds are probably big enough to curl himself into) when he hears what he’s dreading - a rustle and a shifting and Hannibal’s sleep-thickened voice asking, “Will?”

“Sorry, sorry,” he hears himself whisper, and he’s not even sure what for. _Sorry I woke you. Sorry I’m such a helpless wreck I don’t know what to do here. Sorry I screwed up your entire life and you had to kill a man in self-defense and now there’s blood on your nice office carpet.  Sorry I popped those buttons on your shirt_.  Will’s just… _sorry._

There’s a vague noise like a sigh or a groan - he’d have pegged Hannibal to wake up suddenly and thoroughly, but apparently that’s not the case, at least not tonight.  After more rustling, Hannibal’s head and an arm emerge from the blankets and reach out toward Will.  "Come here and warm up. It’s freezing.“

Will can’t actually tell if he’s dragging his feet - they’re so numb he can barely feel them - but he’s doing it metaphorically at least, one slow step toward another back toward the bed.  "It’s fine. I run hot and half the time I end up on the couch under a pile of dogs anyway.”

Hannibal blinks at him and reminds Will unaccountably of an owl. “You’re not sleeping with a pile of dogs tonight.  Come here, Will.”

He sounds so certain Will’s going to do exactly that, and it lightens something in his chest to just do what Hannibal wants him to do.  Not to have to think or fret or second-guess.  That had been good, last night. Apparently it’s still good now.

Okay.

“Okay,” he repeats out loud, as much to himself as Hannibal, and then he lets himself crawl back into bed, back under the blankets where it’s a little warmer even though his own side of the sheets no longer holds his body heat. He shivers a little at the touch of the cold sheets.

He shivers again, for an entirely different reason, as a warm arm snakes around his waist and snares him back into the impossible warmth – and just as impossible nakedness – of Hannibal’s body, his back pressed against Hannibal’s chest, so close he can feel the rise and fall of the other man’s breath.  And he just breathes for a minute in time with that breath, in and out, rise and fall, as if there’s nowhere else in the world either of them should be.

Finally he mumbles, because god forbid he let himself have a few more nice hours of this before it all falls apart spectacularly in the morning, “What are we doing here?”

“We’re sleeping.  Or we will be if you’ll just settle down and let me warm you up.  We’ll sleep, and you can tell me all your objections in the morning, and I’ll tell you why you’re wrong about them.  And then we’ll see, but I hope you’ll let me come back again tomorrow.”

The man’s voice is hypnotic when he wants it to be.  Will feels a little bit like a snake being charmed. And he is, in fact, thoroughly charmed.  

He’s got precisely one defense left against falling headlong into whatever this is, and he uses it.  He draws his knees up and shoves his still-freezing-cold feet backwards until they find warmth between Hannibal’s calves, and laughs out loud when the movement draws a sound like a yelp from Hannibal.  He wouldn’t have thought the man had that sound in him.  

“This is what this would be like, Hannibal.  My dogs are a pain in the ass and I’m a pain in the ass and I’m either going to freeze you or sweat on you or yell at you in my sleep.  You’d be sorry if you came back again. You’d never get another night’s sleep.”

He’d expected Hannibal to draw back but he doesn’t, he just presses his calves tighter together and their warmth starts to seep into Will’s cold toes.  Hannibal sighs and the warm breath tickles the back of Will’s neck.  "I’d hoped you might make this easy for me,“ he says.

"You haven’t been keeping very good notes on me if you ever thought that was a possibility,” he responds.

Hannibal shifts a little, wraps him even closer and warmer, and shifts his legs to trap Will’s feet more tightly. “I’ll have to pay closer attention to you, then. Which is going to be easier to do from here. Fight me about it in the morning, Will.  I’m tired and you must be, too. Close your eyes.”

Will really is tired, and he knows this isn’t possibly going to work, but the warmth spreading through him makes him want to believe otherwise.  Maybe he can let himself have that for a few hours.

He closes his eyes and lets himself slowly melt, all the way down to his near-frozen toes, and eventually he drifts away.


	14. S1 AU Pt 2: Imprudent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is both a response to a "things you said with no space between us" prompt, and a continuation of my ["Indiscretion" ficlet](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5577109/chapters/13669209), in which Hannibal charms his way into Will's bed after their run-in with Tobias Budge in season 1 and Will, well, he freaks out a little.
> 
> Tumblr user avegetariancannibal made me this [delightful naked Lithuanian octopus](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com/post/139209028284/avegetariancannibal-damnslippyplanet-i-liked) to go with it, which will make (slightly) more sense once you read the thing.
> 
> Continued in the subsequent chapters of this compilation.

Will swims back into consciousness vaguely aware that something’s wrong. The sun’s in the wrong place.  The dogs haven’t woken him. His leg’s asleep.

No, his leg’s _pinned_.

His leg’s pinned because Hannibal’s still in his bed and has a leg slung over both of Will’s and he’s…snoring, faintly.  That’s a thing Hannibal does, apparently.

Another thing Hannibal does, Will is fairly sure based on the other available evidence, is get up and feed the dogs to let Will sleep in until the sun is in completely the wrong part of the sky. And then, apparently, he gets back into bed and tangles himself up with Will like some sort of Lithuanian octopus.  A very naked Lithuanian octopus.

A naked Lithuanian octopus whose breathing has just altered subtly, and whose hand appears to be making its way up Will’s arm.

Will stops breathing.

Or at least, he _thought_ he’d stopped breathing, but apparently he didn’t, because he _definitely_ stops breathing when Hannibal’s lips touch his neck, and you probably can’t stop breathing twice.

Hannibal sounds insufferably smug when he says, “Good morning, Will. Did you want to pick up our conversation now?”

There’s not a damn thought in Will’s head at the moment other than _hands, mouths, skin, need,_ and he struggles to connect the words with some sort of sense.  “Our…conversation?”

“Your objections. You were going to tell me all about them, I think. I could think of more enjoyable ways to pass what remains of the morning, but I am at your disposal if you insist.”

“…what remains…?” Will does manage to pull enough brain cells together to look over at the clock and find it’s much later than it should be.  “Shit.  I’m supposed to be –”

“Here.  You’re supposed to be precisely where you are.”  There’s a subtle increase of pressure of Hannibal’s arm around Will, holding him to the bed. Something in him gives a slow, hot shudder at that.  “I took the liberty of calling Jack and telling him that I’m taking a couple of days off to recover from the stress of my run-in with Tobias Budge.  I told him that you had agreed to my professional recommendation that you do the same.”

Will can’t decide if he’s annoyed or relieved at Hannibal’s presumption.  He _does_ know this wasn’t the conversation he was expecting to have.  And that Hannibal’s pressed up against his back without a sliver of space between them, making it very clear what he had in mind for passing the time.

 _Fuck_.  Will suddenly wants nothing more than to spend the rest of this day, which Hannibal has so thoughtfully and annoyingly cleared for him, not getting out of bed.  But there’s still a very good chance that this is temporary insanity of some sort and he’s not sure he can take getting into this any deeper if that’s the case.

He wriggles and twists himself around to face Hannibal so he can try to see a truth or a lie in his eyes when he asks again, “What are we doing? This is insane.”

“You’re going to have to be more precise about your objections,” Hannibal says, and makes Will suddenly very aware that he’s still wearing a shirt when Hannibal runs his hand up under it, up Will’s back, fanning out his fingers in a warm and oddly precise way against Will’s skin underneath the thin fabric. Steady and possessive and sure, like someone who knows exactly what his hands can do.  Will shivers without meaning to.  “I did _not_ inform Jack that my phone call was the last piece of professional advice I would be giving him related to you. But I would very much _like_ to tell him that, if you’ll allow it. I assume that’s your primary objection.”

“It’s one of them. Mainly, I can’t figure out what you’re doing here.”  It’s one of those moments when Will thinks eye contact might kill him, but it’s not as if dropping his eyes to Hannibal’s jaw, or his silvered chest hair, or really any other bit of him, is any less distracting.  He opts to close his eyes instead.  “I was convenient and you were freaking out, and that’s fine, but let’s not pretend it’s something else.“

“We would have ended up here eventually, Budge just provided the push.”  

God, he’s smug.  So damn sure of himself.  Will feels a wild urge to bite Hannibal’s lower lip to shut him up. Instead he says, “You’re having some sort of near-death-experience psychosis, Hannibal.”

“If so, it’s a psychosis that’s lasted for quite a while now.  Do you think this just occurred to me last night?”

Will’s eyes fly open despite himself; he’s that surprised.  “Didn’t it?”

Hannibal’s hand moves itself to Will’s jaw, running surprisingly gently over the stubble there, tilting him as if to kiss him, but there’s no kiss that follows.  Just Hannibal’s eyes, almost painful in their intensity on Will’s face.  “You see so much and are somehow still so blind.  It’s one of your many charms. “

“When, then?”  It’s all he can think of to say; his head’s spinning.

“I think I knew when you threatened Ms. Lounds, after our visit with Abigail. You were so prickly, and so protective of Abigail.  Both were appealing. But it was brewing earlier.  That visit just clarified a few things.”

And that’s…weird, Will _knows_ it’s weird, but it’s increasingly hard to care that it’s weird.

He sucks in a deep breath and prepares about three more concerns and then just…stops.  Realizes he’s fighting against the thing he wants, and being given every reason not to fight it, and suddenly he can’t remember why he started in the first place.

He finds himself saying instead, “Okay. Fine. Call Jack and tell him you’re done being my psychiatrist. That probably needs to happen anyway, right? Even if this turns out to be the worst idea in the world?”

“It would be the prudent thing to do.”

God, they’re so close to a kiss.  There’s about a quarter inch of daylight between their lips and no such daylight at all between any other part of them.  Will feels vibrantly, achingly _alive_ , not a single shadow or killer in his head, for a change. Just Hannibal.

He spends about five seconds considering the conversation he’s going to have to have with Alana about finding a new psychiatrist, and then decides he really, really doesn’t want to think about that conversation right now.  Or about much of anything that exists outside this house.  Hannibal’s bought them two days in Wolf Trap, away from the world.  

Two days is enough time for a lot of ill-advised life choices.

He moves just enough to rest a hand at Hannibal’s waist, where it would be slipping under the waistband of his briefs if he were still wearing them (which he’s not, and Will wonders just how much of the next two days he can keep it that way), and he breathes more than actually says the words, “I give up. You can call him later.  Let’s do something imprudent now.”

He leans in and closes that quarter-inch of daylight until there’s no space left between them at all.


	15. S1 AU Pt 3: Intoxication

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A "things you said while drunk" prompt which is also a continuation of the canon-divergent "Hannigram get together post-Tobias-Budge; Will predictably flips out" 'verse begun in [Indiscretion](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5577109/chapters/13669209) and followed up in [Imprudent](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5577109/chapters/13773220).
> 
> I can't decide whether to admit this thing has a life of its own and wants to be its own story and give it an actual plot, or whether to insist on stopping here because if it stretches out too much longer it's gonna almost have to get less delightfully fluffy at some point because, you know. Murder Cannibal. Perhaps we should draw the curtain here where Will is a happy puppy. Or not. I do enjoy this little AU quite a bit.
> 
> (Okay, fine, there's at least one more chapter - click "next chapter" for it.)

Will watches Alana’s car pull out of the driveway, standing in the doorway and hanging on to it mostly because he’s a little afraid he’ll fall over if he doesn’t. He waits until he’s sure she’s really gone before he goes back inside and closes the door to find the scene in his living room exactly as he’d left it.  He surveys it for a minute and then crosses the room to drop into the nearest chair, head in his hands.

“Jesus Christ,” he manages to gasp out, on the edge of hysterical laughter.  "We might as well have just hung a ‘Go Away, We’re Fucking’ sign on the door and not answered it at all.“

Alana’s a perceptive woman but the perception hadn’t been necessary.  If she’d managed to miss putting together Will’s extremely rumpled bed, two days’ worth of dishes for two people piled in the sink, how flushed with whiskey and limerence he is, and the fact that no one’s heard from either Will or Hannibal in two days but yet there Hannibal is in Will’s house, she couldn’t possibly have missed –

"You couldn’t have put on a _shirt_?”

He supposes he should be grateful Hannibal was wearing _pants_ when they’d heard the car in the driveway.  He supposes he should be grateful, given the way the last day and a half have gone, that they’d been in the middle of a discussion about whether one more dinner could possibly be scraped together from the depths of Will’s pantry or whether they should just declare the last of the whiskey to be dinner in and of itself.  It could have been something a lot more embarrassing.

It’s embarrassing enough as it is. Or at least it is for Will, who’s trying to process through a brain smeary with liquor the fact that three - four? - days ago he’d kissed Alana a few feet away from the chair in which Hannibal is currently sitting shirtless and barefooted and disheveled.   He doesn’t suppose there’s any chance at all that Alana failed to notice the glaring pink mark on Hannibal’s neck that Will hadn’t quite managed to contain himself from leaving there the day before.

Hannibal stretches long and loose-limbed in his chair and says only, “My shirt is all the way over there. It seemed a long way to go to cover up something she’d have found out soon enough anyway.”  His words are oddly precise, with little pauses, as if it’s costing him something to place them in just the right order. Will’s amused and glad to note he’s not the only one who probably should have stopped a couple of drinks earlier.

Hannibal  reaches down to scratch idly at just the right spot between Winston’s ears, and Will wonders when he had time to figure out what each of the individual dogs like. And then he remembers just how quickly Hannibal figured out what _Will_ likes.  And then he’s pretty sure he blushes crimson, as he drains the last of the whiskey in his glass in a useless attempt to hide his expression.

He gets up and moves unsteadily toward Hannibal’s shirt, draped over a chair where Will vaguely remembers tossing it at some point earlier in the afternoon, then balls it up and throws it at Hannibal.   _Tries_ to throw it at Hannibal.  It sails wide of the mark and Will stares at it blankly before muttering, “Fine. That’s fine. I’m just…going to quit both of my jobs and change my name and go live in the woods.  You can visit me there if you want.”

“I’d miss you terribly,” Hannibal says with a smile that Will can hear as much as see.  “Is it really the end of the world if Alana knows?”

There’s something in his voice that makes Will squint at him, narrow-eyed and suspicious, a warmth beyond the effects of the whiskey.  Something in the dismissive way he waves his arm at the door where Alana so recently departed, and the satisfaction in his voice.  “You’re _glad_ ,” he says aloud just as he’s figuring it out himself.  “You like that she found out this way.”  More pieces slide into place, things he might have figured out as his short conversation with Alana was happening if he hadn’t been quite so fuzzy.  “You’re…. Are you _jealous_ of Alana?”

It seems a ridiculous accusation; he can’t quite picture anyone being jealous over him, or for that matter Hannibal Lecter, prim and proper psychiatrist, being jealous of anyone.  Then again, Hannibal hasn’t been particularly prim _or_ proper since Will walked into his office to find him bloodied and injured.

Hannibal dips his head in something like acknowledgement and cants his gaze toward the door again.  “I told you, all of this has been on my mind for some time.  If not precisely in these circumstances.  I may have been somewhat envious that your search for balance took you to someone other than me.”  His eyes turn back to Will and there’s the beginning of a look in them that Will is just starting to know.  “I should perhaps warn you that I have been accused of being somewhat possessive of things which are mine.”

Will’s impulse is to say _I wasn’t yours then_ , low and inviting and as close to flirtation as he knows how to get.  But it seems presumptuous. An hour ago he wasn’t entirely sure this… _whatever_ this is…would be extending past tomorrow morning when they both have to go back to their real lives, and now he’s thinking of himself as Hannibal’s?  It seems unwise.  

He’s not sure he cares, at this exact moment, about wisdom.  He’d like to blame it on the alcohol but he’s pretty sure it’s more than that.

Instead he just says, “I guess I could have figured that out on my own. Should we talk about that?”

“We could,” Hannibal allows. “We should, probably, in the morning before we rejoin the rest of the world.  I’d prefer to avoid any further intrusions from the outside world tonight, if that’s all right with you.”

The outside world - his job, and Jack, and Alana, and…no, Will’s not in any hurry to get back to any of that.  Not when there are a few swallows of whiskey left at the bottom of the bottle, and Hannibal looking at him like that, and the echo of the word _mine_ wrapped in Hannibal’s accent, rolling around in his mind.

“That’s definitely all right with me,” he says, and takes a couple of steps back toward the bed, expecting Hannibal to follow him.  He’s brought up short when he doesn’t - did he misunderstand? Does that look not mean quite what he thinks it does?

He looks back to find an expression he can’t quite categorize on Hannibal’s face, before his now-ex-psychiatrist says, “I have a confession to make.”

Will waits on edge for something terrible.

“The other reason I didn’t get up when Alana arrived,” Hannibal says precisely and perhaps just the tiniest bit slurred, “is that I’m not _entirely_ sure my legs are working right now, and I didn’t want to fall over in front of my romantic rival.”

A laugh spirals from Will’s throat unbidden.  He’s not sure if it’s the notion of Alana and Hannibal as rivals for Will’s threadbare affections, or of Hannibal doing anything so undignified as being drunk enough to fall over, or just the culmination of every impossible thing that’s happened since Tobias Budge.  Whatever it is, he’s _happy_ and he can’t remember the last time that he could really say that.

He makes his own slightly wobbly way over to Hannibal and holds out his hands to haul the other man to his feet.  They waver slightly, together, and share a whiskey-flavored kiss, and make a careful path toward the bed, weaving their way around dogs and discarded clothes.  

Will’s not entirely sure either of them are going to be up to anything particularly energetic at this exact moment, but there’s later tonight.  And tomorrow morning.  And, he’s finally starting to understand, the day after and apparently the one after that.

He thinks maybe in the morning before they go their separate ways, he’ll ask Hannibal to dinner tomorrow night.  An actual dinner date, with clothes and shoes and no sex until at least after the main course.

He thinks maybe he’ll leave open the possibility of skipping dessert and inviting himself back to Hannibal’s house to stay the night.  He hasn’t seen Hannibal’s bedroom yet, after all.


	16. S1 AU Pt 4: Inflamed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Before Hannibal can say anything, Will looks away and says, “So I’m pretty fucked, huh? At least you found out before any of this got serious. What is it?” _How am I broken? How fast are you going to run?_
> 
> Or: A continuation of the canon-divergent S1 AU I seem to be building over the course of various prompts. Ciel1995 wanted more of this, so here we are. This'll probably make more sense if you go back and read the earlier chapters starting [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5577109/chapters/13669209), but you could read this stand-alone with the general knowledge that this is an AU where Will and Hannibal get together after the Tobias Budge Stag Bludgeoning Fiasco. Will's pretty insecure about the whole thing. Hannibal's anything but. Alana knows and is not entirely pleased. Hannibal may or may not be a cannibal. Will has a new dog. This particular installment is a canon-adjacent version of Trou Normand. There, you're caught up.

Will stands alone on a beach full of bodies and he sees, in painful detail, how they got that way. There’s pain and he’s not sure if it’s his own, or the killer’s, or the victims’.  There’s pounding, and he’s not sure if it’s his headache or the waves. He hopes it’s the waves, because he’s already taken a day’s worth of aspirin and it’s barely noon.

In a minute he’ll turn away from the tower of bodies and step outside the circle that’s been cleared for him, to go tell Jack what he’s seen.  But he allows himself a moment first, a moment to close his eyes and think  _ I wish Hannibal were here, or I were anywhere  _ _ but _ _ here, I wish -- _

                     the world  _ blinks _ and rearranges itself --

and Will is in Hannibal’s waiting room with all the abruptness of dream logic.  His head’s not throbbing anymore, but he’s overheated, still bundled in all his outdoor layers and clammy like he’s sweated through his clothes.

He’s just standing there, blinking stupidly and trying to rearrange his mind around the missing space where a totem pole stood five minutes earlier, when Hannibal finds him.

“Will!”  His face lights up with more of a smile than Will would have believed the man had in him, before Tobias Budge.  Which seems to be how Will’s thinking of an awful lot of things lately. Before Tobias and After Tobias.  Since Tobias, since they started  _ dating  _ or whatever it is they’re doing, Hannibal smiles and seems to mean it.  “I wasn’t expecting you tonight.  Did I miss a call?”

Will shakes his head mutely, and that seems to be all he can do.  He watches Hannibal’s smile crack and fade, and follows him back into his office.

He hasn’t been in this room since Hannibal told Jack he was through seeing Will as a patient.  Even when they meet here in the evening before going out to dinner, Will hasn’t gone past the waiting room.  He wanted a little space between what the two of them were, and what they’re becoming. 

That space feels gone, suddenly.  Ripped away, with something raw exposed underneath.  He’s back in this room and Hannibal’s looking at him like something broken again and it’s too much like it used to be, before.

Will can’t hold still, not in here and not for this.  He’s pacing even before he finishes stripping off his hat, gloves, and scarf.

“I don’t know how I got here,” he finally manages to say, and between them they piece together enough to know that he must have driven himself back from Virginia.  He can’t, however hard he tries, remember any of it.   “I was on the beach, and then I was here.  I don’t even know if I told Jack I was leaving.”

Hannibal stares at him a moment before responding dryly, “While I advocate for good manners wherever possible, I truly don’t think this is a situation where a polite goodbye to Jack Crawford is the primary concern at the moment.”

Will manages to dredge up a rusty-sounding chuckle that he doesn’t entirely feel.  “If you’re advocating rudeness it really must be serious.  What’s  _ wrong _ with me?”

“Will you humor me a moment?”

Hannibal hands over one of his sketchpads and a pen and has Will draw a clock. He stands too close while Will’s doing it, face practically buried in Will’s neck, doing that damn sniffing thing he does again.  Will could almost think the clock task is just a ruse to stand close except that Hannibal doesn’t need that ruse anymore, and Hannibal’s face falls visibly when he looks at Will’s handiwork.

Before Hannibal can say anything, Will looks away and says, “So I’m pretty fucked, huh?  At least you found out before any of this got serious.  What is it?”   _ How am I broken?  How fast are you going to run? _

Hannibal looks at the paper again as if it might say something different this time, and then sets it aside.  He puts a hand on Will’s forehead like he’s feeling for fever, and Will should wince away but he just sighs and leans into it.  He’s suddenly so extraordinarily tired and he just wants to let Hannibal take over and fix things.

“I should have said something earlier,” Hannibal finally says.  “I’d thought this was all work stress, but I may have missed something.  Will you let me make an appointment for you, for some tests?  An MRI and some bloodwork, to start with.”

“I hate MRIs,” Will grumbles.  “But I also hate my body driving around without me, so.  Yeah, okay.”

Will doesn’t protest when Hannibal reaches for a notebook and starts flipping through it, but he does speak up when he realizes Hannibal’s getting ready to make a phone call from his office.  “Wait.  Can we not do that from here?  It feels…”  He gestures vaguely around the room, the space where he was Hannibal’s patient before he was Hannibal’s - boyfriend? Lover? Whatever.  “Confusing,” he finishes awkwardly.

Hannibal tucks the notebook into his coat pocket and collects Will’s belongings from where they’d been strewn around the room in Will’s earlier agitation.  “I’m driving you home,” he says in a tone that brooks no argument.  “I’d  _ like _ you to come back to my place tonight, but we can stay in Wolf Trap if you like. The driving’s non-negotiable, though.  You shouldn’t be behind the wheel right now.”

Will fights down the urge to bristle.  Hannibal’s trying to take care of him. Will can try to let him.

“Your place is okay.  Good, I mean.  The dogs are set overnight since I’m…”  _ supposed to be in Virginia. Not losing my shit like this _ .  “I can stay.”

He takes his outerwear from Hannibal and stares at it like it belongs to someone else.  He stares determinedly down at his gloves as he asks, “I know you well enough to know you’re not going to tell me until you’re sure, but at least tell me - is it something really bad?  Should I be picking out my funeral clothes or something?”

It’s not until Hannibal enfolds him in a hug that Will realizes he’s been wanting one since he opened his eyes on Hannibal’s waiting room.  He sags into it with the relief of letting someone else hold him steady for a while, and doesn’t let go.

“Nothing like that,” Hannibal says low and at least plausibly truthful-sounding in Will’s ear.  “We’ll do the tests and see, but you’re going to be fine.  We’ll treat whatever it is.”

Will sighs and closes his eyes, and tries to believe that.  “You know, if you missed something when you were treating me, Jack’s going to be really pissed off at you.  Misdiagnosing his fragile teacup.”

“Will.”  Hannibal draws back and Will lets him go, reluctantly.  “I promise you, Jack Crawford is still the very least of my concerns.  I don’t care if your Virginia killer takes Jack next.  I might help, if he doesn’t stop driving you this way.”

Will’s too tired for the millionth round of  _ Jack-doesn’t-drive-me-I-choose-to-do-this _ , and maybe he needs to rethink that line of argument anyway.  He tries not to picture Jack’s head atop the totem pole.  He blinks the image away and says, “Just take me home, okay?”

It’s nearly full dark by the time they get on the road in Hannibal’s car, leaving Will’s behind.  He considers telling Hannibal about the killer - the severed limbs, the blood-spattered sand, the  _ pride _ and  _ glee _ he’d picked up - but it feels too hard, and he’s still too self-conscious about whatever it is he  _ doesn’t _ remember.

In the end he just leans his head against the window, shivering at the touch of the cold glass on his overheated skin, and lets himself drift in and out.  Surrenders himself, for a while, to the notion that Hannibal will take care of everything that needs to be taken care of, Will included.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Just as a side note, other prompter who wanted a fic for the song series based on "Buzzcut Season" - you're not wrong if you look at this and go "Huh, that could almost be my prompt!" This was originally going to be a two-prompts-in-one fic but I've decided to do something else with Buzzcut Season, so stick around and I'll eventually do that as a different fic. <3)


	17. That’s My Monster, Pt. 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will’s touch moves lightly from Hannibal’s bruised and battered arm up to his face. He brushes something off Hannibal’s forehead. Hair? Kelp? Hannibal isn’t sure and doesn’t care; he’s electric with Will’s touch, with fresh air, with blood and freedom. 
> 
> Or: A prompt for a rather more self-assured post-fall Will than we tend to see in a lot of fic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [everybreathagift](http://archiveofourown.org/users/everybreathagift/pseuds/everybreathagift) wanted to see:
> 
>  
> 
> _While I love ‘totally still straight, no homo at all, wait, maybe not, but I’m not going to do anything about it, wait, maybe I might be’ hesitant post fall Will, give me Will that’s 100% confident about where they stand and the minute they’re back at a safe house, he’s touching Hannibal freely and cracking jokes about him not dying AGAIN and kissing Hannibal to shut up his medical blabbering because the moment he got in the police car with Hannibal he’d made his choice and there’s nothing for him to shy away from. And Hannibal is still a love stricken fool that is pretty sure he must have died because none of it can be real_
> 
>  
> 
> This is a "scribbled in half an hour as a quick-writing exercise, barely reread much less edited, please tolerate the roughness" sort of thing. Forgive it its faults, pretty please.

They more or less fall through the front door together, trailing mud and water and gobbets of unspeakable things - seaweed, flesh, blood, not all of it their own. They’re leaving evidence they shouldn’t be leaving. They’ll never be able to clean up properly in the shape they’re in.  Jack will take one look at this place once he finds it and he’ll know they survived.  They’ll be hunted.

Hannibal should care.

Hannibal does not care.

Hannibal does not care about a single damn thing except that he’s _alive_ , he’s never been so alive in his entire life, and he doesn’t think Will’s stopped touching him since they dragged each other from the sea.  He thinks his brain might have short-circuited; he hasn’t been touched in so long by anyone, much less by Will.  Certainly not like this - easy and affectionate and concerned, like Will might ruffle through one of his dogs’ fur looking for an injury.

Will running hands over Hannibal looking for where he’s hurt.  Will peeling the tatters of his sweater off and sucking in his lower lip in concern at the gunshot wound.  Will impossibly bright-eyed. He must be hurt himself, his voice is thick with blood in his mouth, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed.

Eventually Will seems to satisfy himself that he knows where the injuries are, if not necessarily what to do about them, and steps back to ask, “Where’s the med kit?”

Hannibal’s woozy with blood loss and fading adrenaline and Will’s hands and Will’s _everything_ and he can only blink dumbly for a moment.

“Come on, Hannibal.” Impatient and amused and - affectionate? Hannibal’s never heard that tone from Will before. “Stay with me. Control freak like you, I know you’ve got this place stocked.”

Injured dignity snaps at Hannibal’s mind like a rubber band, waking him up enough for him to say, “Second door on the left.  We’ll need…”  He trails off and looks at Will and himself and says, “Everything. Bring everything.”

“ _There_ you are.”  Will’s touch moves lightly from Hannibal’s bruised and battered arm up to his face.  He brushes something off Hannibal’s forehead.  Hair? Kelp?  Hannibal isn’t sure and doesn’t care; he’s electric with Will’s touch, with fresh air, with blood and freedom.  If Jack catches them two miles from here, any consequences will have been worth it for this. “Stay awake, okay? I’ll be right back and you’re going to have to talk me through this. It would be pretty dumb for either of us to die now.”

“I’ll try,” Hannibal says faintly.  

“ _That’s_ my monster,” Will replies.  

His smile is bloody and sweet.  

His lips, when he leans in and presses them to Hannibal’s, are slick and hot and coppery.  Salt and blood and pain, for them both.  There and gone - Hannibal feels him shudder and pull back, wincing, and then wincing again when the first wince pulls at his cheek wound.

“Okay, that was not my best work. Let’s pretend that never happened and then try it again when my face doesn’t have an extra hole in it.”

Hannibal’s dead.  He must be dead.  It’s the only explanation for this; he’s dead and Will Graham is dead and Will improbably, has come to lead him to an afterlife he never thought he believed in.  His head’s spinning.  

He says faintly: “That was perfect.”

Will stares at him for a minute and then breathes, “Christ. We are going to be so terrible for each other. Let’s get patched up and get out of here.”

He stands and limps slowly off down the hallway. Hannibal watches him go and tries to figure out for a minute why he looked so strange, just then.  It takes him almost all the time Will is gone to figure it out: Somewhere under the mud and blood and injury, Will Graham is incandescently happy.


	18. That’s My Monster, Pt. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s not precisely an invitation, but then Hannibal’s rarely waited for one before forcing his way into some new corner of Will’s life. And Will did kiss him. Twice, unless Hannibal was so far gone on the painkillers that he imagined the second one, which he’s _almost sure_ happened.
> 
> Or: A follow-up to [this ficlet](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5577109/chapters/15183919), in which Will knows exactly what he wants (although he's not really in any shape for it, at the moment.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [everybreathagift](http://archiveofourown.org/users/everybreathagift/pseuds/everybreathagift) wants to know: _Imagine this Will in bed? The first time they’re intimate? How Hannibal would completely fall apart under Will’s confident hands?_
> 
> And, well, be careful - sometimes you get what you ask for. Here's Will in bed! Just...not what you wanted. Never fear, though, injuries mend and we'll definitely be back to check in on these two and on Will's confident hands.

They stay until the flames have well and truly taken hold.  They stand, perhaps, too close.  To the flames, and the bluff’s edge, and each other.  Tongues of heat lick at Hannibal’s face.

He’s not watching the fire eat his house, or turn Francis Dolarhyde into ash, or send sparks out over the sea.   He doesn’t care that somewhere inside, priceless wines will be boiling until they shatter their bottles.  He doesn’t care that the gunshot wound in his side is on fire, or that he’s not entirely sure how much longer his legs will hold him up, now the adrenaline is wearing off.

Firelight dances on Will Graham’s face, casting shadows, gilding his features.  Will watches the last of his old life burn away, barely blinking. 

What else in the world could possibly warrant Hannibal’s attention?

 

* * *

 

They drive overnight, or rather Will drives.  Once they’ve swapped the patrol car for something less conspicuous, Hannibal offers to take a turn. Will flat-out laughs at him. Hannibal can’t remember when he last heard Will laugh like that.  Has he ever heard Will laugh like that? 

“First shift’s mine,” Will says, and points toward the backseat.  “You’re going to get some sleep.  I might let you drive tomorrow if you’ve gotten the hang of sitting upright by then.”  

Hannibal wants to protest, “I can--”

But he sways on his feet and Will catches him by the arm, and that’s where the second kiss happens.  By the side of a near-deserted road, standing next to the car they stole a few miles back, both smelling of smoke.  It’s slow and gentle, little more than a warm press of lips and a sigh.

But when Will pulls back and smiles, a little half-smile like he knows all sorts of things Hannibal doesn’t, all he says is, “Better. Goodnight, Hannibal.”  And then he points to the backseat and Hannibal goes, too mazed with the night’s events to put up any further protest.  He makes a rough sort of nest in the backseat with their jackets, dry-swallows another pill, and gives himself over to whatever semblance of sleep he can manage.

* * *

There’s a boat.

Of course there’s a boat.

Will’s half-dead with exhaustion after the all-night drive and in no shape to teach Hannibal to sail yet, so they decide to risk another hour or two for a cat nap before setting sail.  Will sits on the edge of the bed -  _ the berth? the bunk? there will be terminology to learn - _ and waves his good arm vaguely around the cabin.

“There’s not much to explore, but poke around all you want while I’m asleep. Probably better not to go up on deck until we’re ready to leave, but you can check out the galley and figure out what you want to stock up on when we can shop. Fair warning, you’re going to have to learn to cook on a budget unless you’ve got a Swiss bank account we can get to.”

Hannibal  _ thinks  _ Will’s teasing him, but he’s still not entirely sure how to read these new tones and expressions.  Three years spent constructing a meticulous remembered image of Will and he got it wrong. Or reconstructed a man who no longer exists as he was.

“I can make do for now, and when we can make contact safely, Chiyoh will help us with the bank accounts.”  He’s fairly certain it’s the truth, and if not, he’ll find another way.  Hannibal has a lot of questions about their next steps, but the money isn’t what he’s worried about. 

He watches Will stretch out, slowly and gingerly, with a groan.  He watches Will settle, awkwardly, on his less-injured side.

Will does not take up the whole bed - which, Hannibal couldn’t avoid noticing, appears to be the only one in sight.  Will leaves a space.

It’s not precisely an invitation, but then Hannibal’s rarely waited for one before forcing his way into some new corner of Will’s life.  And Will  _ did _ kiss him.  Twice, unless Hannibal was so far gone on the painkillers that he imagined the second one, which he’s  _ almost _ sure happened.

He eases himself down with a hiss of pain, and Will doesn’t complain, so Hannibal makes a slow and painful traversal of the mattress - which looks small, but feels huge when every movement pulls at stitches and ruined muscle. 

It takes what feels like an age, but he finds his way.  They fit together wordlessly and carefully, not with the ease of Hannibal’s daydreams, but with winces and grunts and muttered curses of pain.  It’s nearly impossible to find a place for Will’s injured arm, Hannibal’s cracked ribs.  The effort is exhausting.

When they finally come to a careful, pained rest, Hannibal realizes too late that he should have taken another pill or checked Will’s stitches.  But he has no intention of moving, then or perhaps ever again.  Not with Will’s head tucked so carefully under Hannibal’s chin, not with the warmth radiating between them in the places they touch.

Will mumbles, half-muffled in Hannibal’s shirt, “Wake me up in an hour, two hours at the most.  Okay?”

“Neither of us has a watch.” He could laugh, if it wouldn’t re-ignite the pain in his ribs.  They don’t have a watch. They don’t have money beyond what they took from the cliff house and whatever Will has stashed away.  They have only the tiniest shards of a plan. He hurts all over and he’s still not entirely sure the gunshot won’t end up killing him, if they aren’t careful about infection.

He can’t seem to care about any of it.

Will buries his face further, close to Hannibal’s heart, and Hannibal supposes he can feel it racing.  “Count the seconds or something,” he says.  “Or just wake me up when you get bored.”

_ Bored. _  Bored, with fresh air and freedom and Will curled against him smelling of smoke and the convenience store coffee that kept him awake all night.  Bored, with time to replay every precious moment of Dolarhyde’s death.  Bored, with  _ this _ .

“That could take quite a while,” he says, but by the time he does Will’s already half-gone.  He makes a vague, sleepy, fussy noise against Hannibal, but nothing further.

Hannibal takes note of the position of the sun slanting through the cabin window, where it falls across Will’s leg.  He calculates roughly where he thinks it will be in an hour and a half, and then dismisses the issue of timekeeping from his mind until it reaches that point. 

Until then, Hannibal has an embarrassment of riches to keep him occupied.  He lies still, so Will can sleep, and begins construction of a new section of his memory palace.


	19. That’s My Monster, Pt. 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _There’s a small patch of perfect skin just below Will’s collarbone, unmarred by scrapes or bruises or bandages. All Hannibal can think about while tending to Will’s injuries is sinking his teeth into that one smooth expanse of skin._
> 
>  
> 
> (Will make more sense if you've read the previous two chapters, probably, or just accept that this 'verse is not completely concerned with keeping Will in character. Let's just let the guy be happy for once, okay?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ("Slippy," you say, "are you ever going to let these two Do It?" 
> 
> "Oh, probably," I say, waving my hand airily.)
> 
> (I thought it was going to happen in this chapter. I really did. But then Will wanted to make fun of a hungover Hannibal for a while. Maybe next time, if anyone wants more of this 'verse.)

Will’s wedding ring rests on a shelf for the first two days. On the third day it vanishes and Hannibal doesn’t see it again.  His gaze returns regularly to the line of pale skin circling Will’s finger.

Will’s wife and son are an ache to be borne along with the rest.

 

* * *

 

By their fourth day out on the water, Hannibal’s list of Will’s kisses is growing long and detailed.

They’ve tasted variously of mint, salt, chocolate, and whiskey.

Most have been Will’s to start; twice Hannibal has grasped at something like bravery or desperation and stolen kisses for himself.  Both have been met with surprise and then apparent enjoyment.  All have left Hannibal shaken and undone, while Will has most often been infuriatingly unruffled.

Most have been one-offs, but kisses seven through twelve arrived all in a row, slow and sweet as molasses, on a morning when Hannibal had come to wake Will for his turn at watch.  

None of them have involved more than minimal wandering of hands - there are too many stitches, too many bruises and bandages. They’d have been hard pressed to find bare patches of uninjured skin if they’d tried.  

But Hannibal _wants_ , oh, how he wants. There’s a small patch of perfect skin just below Will’s collarbone, unmarred by scrapes or bruises or bandages.  All Hannibal can think about while tending to Will’s injuries is sinking his teeth into that one smooth expanse of skin.

On the fifth day they go ashore separately, dividing their errand list to move about quickly and unnoticed.  It’s unsettling to be without Will for the first time in days. To be among people other than jailers and juries for the first time in years. Hannibal keeps his head down and does what he must, trying not to consider the possibility that Will might not return to him.  Might be recognized, or worse, might simply decide to fade into the busy port and never return.  

He returns to find Will already on board, putting away groceries and humming something tuneless and jaunty.  Will looks up and smiles, warm and open and pleased, and Hannibal feels the melting-away of tension he hadn’t realized he was carrying.

They cast off as soon as everything is safely stowed.  Will guides the boat and Hannibal sits in the warm sun, dividing his attention between the breeze ruffling through Will’s hair and the city’s skyline receding slowly into the distance.  He doesn’t feel entirely at ease until it’s out of sight once more.

 

* * *

 

Dinner is something close to festive.  With fresh ingredients, Hannibal manages to pull something like a feast together even with the limited amenities available.  

There is wine, something Will picked out because Hannibal’s tastes are off-limits for the moment for reasons both practical and financial. It’s harsh on the tongue, too young, and doesn’t suit the meal at all.  But it flushes Will’s cheeks with color and warms Hannibal’s insides so that he stops counting the glasses Will’s pouring.

It’s not until after dinner, when the small handful of dishes are dried and put away, that Will finally asks, “Did you manage to reach Chiyoh?”

“It took a few attempts.  She’s not as easy to reach these days as she was.”

“I suppose she wouldn’t be. I hate to ask what she has to say about all of this.”

“The escape was sloppy, the fire unnecessarily attention-getting, and we’re both idiots.”  There had been some additional sharp words about the foolishness of their travelling together, but Hannibal has no intention of sharing those.  “She’ll arrange the money over the next few days. She’s displeased with you for letting me get shot.”

“That wasn’t part of the plan.” Will’s close before Hannibal can read his intent, a palm skimming over Hannibal’s bandages, barely touching them before coming up to rest along his jaw where several days’ worth of beard growth is starting to fill in. “Next time you talk, tell her it won’t happen again. Tell her I’m keeping an eye on you.”

The sixteenth kiss tastes like cherries, and what had been too tart in the wine itself is perfect when shared between their mouths.  The sixteenth kiss has teeth in it, and tongues, and steals Hannibal’s breath away entirely.

Fortunately he doesn’t need breath or speech to nod mutely when Will’s next move is to offer him another glass of wine.

 

* * *

 

The sixth morning starts like this:

He wakes to the moment of confusion that’s coming to be his new normal: a dislocation in time and space before he comes to rest in the present.  Hannibal has always been good at adjusting to circumstances, but three years in the rarely-changing confines of the state hospital have perhaps left him slightly slower to adapt than he once was.

Also, his head is pounding and the sunlight is too bright.  

He sits up and yanks the curtain across the window more viciously than strictly necessary.  The darkness helps.  The rapid sitting-up doesn’t. The cabin spins a bit more than the motion of the waves can explain.

“The ideal hangover cure,” Will says cheerfully and too loudly as he comes through the door bearing a plate and a mug, “is an Egg McMuffin and a giant Coke. But I tried.”

The plate he hands off to Hannibal bears some sort of toasted sandwich, closer to “burnt” than “browned” but smelling of bacon and cheese.  Even before Hannibal takes the coffee, he can smell that it contains enough milk and sugar to barely qualify as coffee at all. It’s closer to a vaguely caffeinated milkshake.

“Eat, splash some water on your face, sleep a little more if you need to,” Will says.  “I can stand watch a while longer.  Come out when you’re feeling human.”

“You’re enjoying this,” Hannibal accuses him, but it’s a mild accusation. The sandwich smells good and he can pour the coffee out when Will’s not looking.

Will hums, a small noncommittal noise that doesn’t sound even slightly like a denial.  “If we run out of money, I might take pictures of your bedhead and sell them to the tabloids,” is his only response before he leaves.

Hannibal waits until he’s sure Will isn’t coming back before he runs a hand through his hair to set it in order.

He takes a small, cautious sip of coffee.  It's not terrible.  He takes another.


	20. Mongoose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was time to pull out the big gun Abigail had been saving for a dire situation. A “my adoptive cannibal dads are threatening to shed blood in broad daylight, and I was really enjoying not being on the run for a while, and I don’t want to spend my Christmas in another shitty safe house” situation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A very bitty little Murder Family ficlet, vaguely Christmas-tinged, with thanks to [amarriageoftrueminds](http://archiveofourown.org/users/amarriageoftrueminds) for excellence in murder husband ideas, and to [everybreathagift](http://archiveofourown.org/users/everybreathagift) for bringing those ideas to my attention, even if the end result only slightly resembles [the ideas in question.](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com/post/154861172911/amarriageoftrueminds-someone-being-rude-to)

It wasn’t the look on Will’s face or the look on Hannibal’s that worried Abigail. She’d seen both of those expressions plenty of times before and most of the time they ended without bloodshed.  (She rather suspected that sometimes the bloodshed was only delayed rather than avoided, the two of them doubling back later without her.  But whatever they got up to behind her back, Will wanted her kept out of it, and that was just fine with her.)

The problem was that she’d never seen them _both_ in this particular mood before. One of them had always stayed cool enough to talk the other one down, but her own (spinning) head appeared to be the coolest one at present.

Which made it time to pull out the big gun she’d been saving for a dire situation. A “my adoptive cannibal dads are threatening to shed blood in broad daylight, and I was really enjoying not being on the run for a while, and I don’t want to spend my Christmas in another shitty safe house” situation.

She took a deep breath, held out her hands for them to pull her up off the ground where the purse-snatcher had knocked her down in his haste to make off with her bag, and snapped their current fake names out a little louder than necessary to get their attention.

“ _Anders_. _David_.  Give me a hand here?”  They stopped telepathically beaming murder plan schematics at each other, or whatever the hell they were doing a moment earlier, long enough to help her up.  It wasn’t enough to stop Hannibal’s head from swivelling to follow the direction the asshole with her purse had gone. He was probably mentally sketching the kid now, in enough perfect detail to recognize him if they found him again.  Probably calculating the best shortcut to take to catch up with him in the parking lot.

Now or never.  Instead of letting their hands go, she tugged them both in closer, so she could whisper quietly:

“ _Mongoose_.”

It brought Will back, anyway.  He blinked at her, furrowed his brow slightly and asked, “What?”

“You heard me. _Mongoose_.  Let him go.”

Hannibal turned back toward her that time, slowly, but with a real smile, not the sharp-toothed snarl of a few moments earlier.  "I wasn’t aware you had picked up our use of that term, my dear.“

"I swear you both think I’m about twelve years old.”  She bent to scoop up one of her fallen bags off the floor, and Will and Hannibal were quick to grab the rest.  "It’s not like you’re _subtle_  with your… you know.“   _Murder safeword_.  "One of you gets all worked up and the other one starts babbling about mongooses and it’s not exactly a _normal_  thing to bring up, even for the two of you. Especially when you only do it right after one of you goes all rage-y, and then the other one backs down right away.”

Will moved rapidly through several shades of embarrassed pink, while Hannibal looked entirely delighted, as if she were a particularly clever pet who’d demonstrated a new trick.

“Sorry,” Will mumbled, casting one of his best woeful-puppy glances at her.  "We were upset.  You could have been hurt.“

She tried not to roll her eyes as she rearranged her mussed hair to cover her missing ear properly.  "I’m fine. He didn’t get anything we can’t replace.  I’m more worried about you two making a scene than anything else.  Can we get out of here?”

They headed out to the car, Hannibal insisting on carrying all of the Christmas shopping bags so that Abigail could baby her very-slightly-twisted ankle, and headed home to finish the Christmas preparations.

Abigail opted not to ask questions when she saw Hannibal sketching the purse-snatcher the next day.  She opted not to ask questions two weeks later when her favorite lipstick, one that had been in the missing purse, silently reappeared on her dresser one morning.  Or when Hannibal went around all the rest of that day looking particularly smug, and Will was particularly deep in his own head, and they vanished into their room immediately after an early dinner and didn’t emerge for the rest of the evening, leaving her to do all the washing-up.

She did briefly consider yelling _mongoose_  through their door on her way to her own room, just to find out whether it was their safeword for anything else, but decided she’d rather not know.

She put in her earplugs and slept deep and dreamless, as she almost always did now.

The next morning she applied her lipstick carefully: a bright, bloody smile.


	21. Surprise!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little bitty ficlet 'cause [Tumblr wanted to know what would have happened if Hanners had been even MORE emotionally confused in Mizumono](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com/post/156289098071/ainemcfate-damnslippyplanet), and Will's reflexes a little faster. This, apparently.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Fair warning before you start: This ficlet does not have a neatly wrapped-up ending. I would LIKE to come back and write a second part to tell you all what happens next but TBH I have no idea. I'm pretty sure Abigail gets her hands on that linoleum knife, but beyond that, I don't know. If the Murder Family ever whispers into my ear where they wan to go from here, I'll come back and tell you all, I promise.)
> 
> (Also, this was banged out in like twenty minutes as an exercise in breaking writer's block, so forgive the rough edges.)

“We couldn’t leave without you,” Hannibal says, and it’s all he can say before the words choke him with their own weight.  

Will doesn’t smell like Freddie Lounds anymore.  He smells of fear and adrenaline, much as he used to when he trusted Hannibal, when his brain was incandescent, when there were still other paths laid out before them.

The paths are narrowed now, the _selva oscura_ close and thick all around. Hannibal is the only one who will walk out of this room alive. Even so there are small freedoms: free will in the details.  Will might die first, or second.  Abigail might die this way, or that.  Tears or raindrops run down Will’s face in a dozen different directions and even Hannibal can’t predict their precise paths.

Will might, or might not, let Hannibal touch him before he dies.  

He called, when he could have run.  He came. Not all the droplets on his face are rain.  If Hannibal touched Will, his fingertips would come away salt.

He does.

He disrupts a half-dozen droplets with his fingers, diverting them from their small, watery fates.  Smears them with a thumb across Will’s cheekbone; cups his jaw in a hand that has blood beneath the fingernails.

Will doesn’t flinch and the moment holds, stretched thin and precarious over a void.  

When Will’s dead, when he’s blood and meat on the floor and Hannibal is gone, no one will honor him the way he should have been honored.  No one will prepare his heart and consume it with reverence.  His brain will finally burn all the way to ash, or decay underground, or end up in a labeled drawer in a specimen archive.

Hannibal will never know what he would have tasted like, if he doesn’t find out now.

It only takes the smallest pressure of the hand on his face for Will to stumble a step forward.  He’s already opening his mouth as if he might protest, beg or plead or bargain or lie.  Hannibal leans in the way he’s thought of doing a hundred times before, and Will’s breath catches, and in the end it’s as simple as that.  Will has to die, but Hannibal can have this, first.  He can give Will this, in lieu of all the other things he would have given him in a better world.

Will’s face is cold and his lips are warm, and he tastes like he smells: rain and fear and the blood on Hannibal’s lip smearing between them,. Will kisses him back. 

Will kisses him _back_.  

If there were time, in the other world, Hannibal could keep kissing Will until the fear-taste went away and find out what would lie underneath.  Maybe Will would taste like wanting, triumph, or hatred; maybe Hannibal would bite Will’s lip until his blood welled, and then lick it away.

There’s no time. Alana will have called for backup, even if Will didn’t.  Hannibal is trading precious seconds of his escape for seconds of this: Will trembling against him, the small wounded sound caught in Will’s throat, Will’s hand grasping at his shoulder.

It’s almost enough to make him forget about the wicked blade he holds in his other hand, but not quite.  Something in Will makes something in Hannibal soft and weak and wanting, but he’s still what he is.  He brings the knife up smooth and fast, aiming by feel so he doesn’t have to stop kissing Will, so he can take Will’s last breath from his lips and hold it in his lungs as long as he possibly can.

He brings the knife up.  Just as he does, Will _bites_ him hard and sharp, and twists in Hannibal’s arms with all the slippery speed of one of his river trout, knocking Hannibal’s knife away.  The shocks of pain are so sudden that Hannibal’s senses need a moment to sort them out - the pain of his bitten tongue, the pain of his twisted wrist, a gash across his forearm where the knife ripped at his skin before it went skittering across the floor.  

When his head clears, Will’s sprung back a few steps and is staring at him, breathing fast, Hannibal’s blood on his chin.  He’s crouched slightly as if to attack or defend, watching Hannibal, eyes fierce and bright and lovely.  Somewhere in Hannibal’s peripheral vision, Abigail moves.  Hannibal watches the effort it takes Will not to turn toward her.

"I wanted to surprise you,” he tells Will, with Will’s own taste still in his mouth.

Will stares at him, eyes wide and scent wavering wildly now between fear and something new and rich and wonderful.  "I’m surprised,“ he finally says drily, not taking his eyes off Hannibal for a second.

In the long instant when all their lives hang in the balance, before the dark woods unfold a new shining path ahead of them, Hannibal’s heart thumps wildly in his chest.  It takes him several more precious seconds to identify the emotion as something like a wild, exultant joy.


End file.
